Statistics Modifications - Gravity Insights: advanced forum statistics & analytics

Gravity Insights real-time forum analytics

UNDERSTAND YOUR FORUM CONTENT AND USERS. MAKE BETTER DECISIONS FOR YOUR COMMUNITY.

Gravity Insights is a real-time forum analytics service. Gravity Insights is the only analytics service designed to help forum administrators understand their content and users and make their sites better. With Insights, you?ll have a detailed understanding of who comes to your site, why they come to your site and how they interact with your content.

Please visit http://insights.gravity.com for more information.


Feature Highlights
Dashboard

• Hourly trends for the last 24 hours
• Recent stats & trends (pageviews, visitors, new members, new threads, new replies, searches)
• Active Threads
• Active Users
• Trending Topics

Real-time Dashboard

• Real-time stream of new threads
• Real-time stream of new media

Who's using Gravity Insights

1. Crackberry
2. Mothering.com
3. Poke Community
4. PBNation
5. vBSEO
6. and hundreds more

What people are saying?

• Kevin Michaluk, Co-founder Crackberry.com: "Insights does an outstanding job giving us an instant overview of what's happening in real time on the CrackBerry.com forums. There's always a ton of activity and sometimes it's hard to keep up. Gravity Insights not only shows us which threads are the most active, but also gives us an easy way to identify new members who are contributing great content."
  
• Ed Rieker, President of PbNation: "There are a lot of generic analytics services out there. Gravity Insights is NOT one of them. Insights does an amazing job of distilling all the activity in our community into useful information. Monitoring the forum in real-time has also never been easier. Because of Gravity Insights, I now know exactly what's happening on our site. The Gravity team is outstanding, a pleasure to work with and very responsive to our needs. I highly recommend them."
  
• Patrick Clinger, President and CEO, ProBoards, Inc.:"With Gravity Insights I can see what's happening across the millions of ProBoards forums. Gravity Insights is the first analytics service that I've found that includes relevant forum statistics and can scale to meet our heavy traffic volume. As a big analytics user, I continue to be surprised by all the new things I'm discovering with Gravity Insights."

How does Gravity Insights work?
It?s pretty simple. Gravity Insights is a standard vBulletin plugin. Once installed, Gravity Insights puts a lightweight beacon (similar to Google Analytics) on every vBulletin generated webpage. In addition, Gravity Insights has custom hooks that initiate asynchronous server-to-server calls between your vBulletin server and the Gravity Insights servers. These hooks allow Gravity Insights to track all the things that standard analytics software can?t track (like new threads, new replies, new member registrations, etc.).


Requirements to use Gravity Insights
Gravity Insights has been tested with very large and very small forums. You?ll need vBulletin version 3.6 or later to use Gravity Insights. Gravity Insights also supports phpBB, Vanilla Forums, and ProBoards.


Legal stuff?
Gravity Insights is copyright protected by Project Rover, Inc. You?re free to use Gravity Insights (subject to our terms and privacy policy) on any vBulletin forum for which you hold a valid license.


Anything else?
Drop us an email at insights@gravity.com if you have any questions.

If you try Gravity Insights, please click mark as installed and rate the plugin to show your support. And again, let us know what you think ? good or bad! How can we make Gravity Insights better for you?

[gravityinsights]

Originally Posted by lemonadesoda

^^Private forum? What information is transmitted to Gravity Insights?

If you have Gravity Insights installed, when a user visits your community you transmit traffic information (such as which webpages a user views) and user activity information (such as post content and related metadata). By transmitting this information to us, we are able to enable Gravity Insight's killer features without putting a significant load on your servers.

TBH, I think gravity have done an EXCELLENT job. Looks great, and nice info. But be warned about privacy/confidentiality issues if it is relevant to you.

hi lemonadesoda... to address your privacy issue. If you have a private forum you do not wish us to track you can mark it in our config file and we will not log any data for that forum at all. For example some of our largest clients have confidential admin only forums which they mark as private and those stats aren't recorded. If you have a public site, all the information we gather is publicly available already.

thanks,
Jim

[gnatster]

Been using this for a while now. Find it very useful to see what my members are viewing and how I can structure commonly searched items better. The team has been quite responsive in tweaking the product to run better and provide better information.

I'm looking forward to upcoming features as well...

[Trek]

With the ability to exclude forums, I went ahead and installed. Pretty cool so far, only have a small amount of data yet to play with of course so I can't see some of the functionality yet.

Will/is it possible to get some of this data on our forums? I'd like to be able to display what the most active conversations are, etc. Would make perfect forum blocks and CMS widgets.

Also, I'd like to see more integration with vBulletin as far as config options go. I have a large list of forums to exclude, etc. Would be nice if we had (through the AdminCP) a way to select what forums we WANT, or the ones we want to exclude. Whichever is smaller. Much easier to maintain that way.

[gravityinsights]

Originally Posted by Trek

With the ability to exclude forums, I went ahead and installed. Pretty cool so far, only have a small amount of data yet to play with of course so I can't see some of the functionality yet.

Will/is it possible to get some of this data on our forums? I'd like to be able to display what the most active conversations are, etc. Would make perfect forum blocks and CMS widgets.

Also, I'd like to see more integration with vBulletin as far as config options go. I have a large list of forums to exclude, etc. Would be nice if we had (through the AdminCP) a way to select what forums we WANT, or the ones we want to exclude. Whichever is smaller. Much easier to maintain that way.

hi Trek thanks for the feedback. We're definitely planning on opening up these APIs to forum admins so you can surface this data on your site in the very near future, along with "trending topics" (one of the things we do with the post content).

On the vbulletin admin CP panel integration issue... We run on some of the largest forums on the net (proboards, pbnation.com, etc..) and they're #1 concerns are performance, ease of integration and maintainability. Having the IDs manually entered in the config file allows us to not require any integration with your database or have the need to write to files on disk. When you're dealing with 400+ servers it's alot easier to tweak a file and rsync it over to all without needing to tweak the permissions as well.

thanks,
Jim

[gravityinsights]

Originally Posted by Trek

Does this mean that the entire contents of threads/replies are sent? Including any inline images, etc?

If this is true, thanks but no thanks. =) I'd love to use the service, but I don't see any reason why I'd want threads protected by user permissions groups on my forums to be sent, analyzed and used by anyone else. Data collected for statistical purposes makes sense, but post content and images do not, at least to me.

Hi Trek, Thanks for the note. Yes, post content and images are sent to Gravity Insights. If you have specific forums you do not wish to track, you can set those forum IDs in your config file and no data will be tracked or transmitted for those forums. Just to be clear, post and image content is not transmitted “anyone else.” It’s transmitted to us so that we can provide advanced features to you that wouldn’t otherwise be possible (like trending topics and the live content / media streams). We’re working on additional functionality now that will provide you a better sense of your users' interests similar to how services like Quantcast provide demographic data. We think that this type of information will be invaluable to forum operators who are trying to monetize their sites and attract new advertisers.

We appreciate your concern and thanks for the feedback.

[Chuta]

Nice add-on!!!
Tagged.

[molieman]

Originally Posted by molieman

Installed a vB 4.0.2. p1

FANTASTIC!!!!! Thank you from a number cruncher

Lost white background color on forum page, after install.

Haven't heard anymore updates on this matter. Makes my site look bad.

This has effected the "body_background" and the stylevars for body_background is set correctly. I hate to lose data already collected I love it.

Please let me know how close you are in correcting this anomaly?

[pitt34]

Bug on: http://insights.gravity.com/dashboard

Catchable fatal error: Argument 1 passed to services_DashboardInfo::setSite() must be an instance of site_Model, instance of stdClass given, called in /var/www/insights/application/default/controllers/DashboardController.php on line 25 and defined in /var/www/insights/application/default/services/DashboardInfo.php on line 48

[pete_brady]

i lose a chunk of my pages too. is it just a case of changing where it hooks into the page?

i have no idea what i'm talking about...

[gravityinsights]

for those having the footer issue PM me and I'll work with you today to get a resolution. I've contacted those who've already submitted the issue and hopefully we'll get it resolved today asap.

If you are having the issue if you could load up the page, view source and copy/paste that into an email to insights@gravity.com it will help me to understand the problem faster.


thanks,
Jim