Analytics

There’s currently a discussion about Google Analytics in the Governance forum - some users have realized Mozilla uses it and don’t trust us because of it.

Is analytics something that would be on the IT side of things? If so perhaps we should offer Piwik to community sites.

I wouldn’t be concerned.

They must be forgetting that most of Mozilla’s turnover is from Google.

What don’t they trust about it? Can you link us to the post?

It’s the top post in Governance right now, if you’re not following it just find the google group (I use the mailing list).

Point being, is analytics something that counts as IT or WebDev? This would be another opportunity for us to provide value and Piwik is open source (Mozilla Hispano uses it).

Here’s a link to the discussion.

To be honest, it doesn’t look like Mozilla wants to budge, but I think it might be worth a shot for us to step up and offer to provide an instance with Piwik. However, if Mozilla truly wants to use it, I think they would spin up their own instance.

In case they bring up the issue of migrating data, there are scripts that exist for this, including Google2Piwik.

Analytics is often owned by the Data Engineering team.

Are you advocating for Community IT to spin up some analytics tooling?

I think so, if that’s appropriate for our scope. I think it would add value to community sites. If we’re using it, we could also participate in discussions on whether or not it would be viable for MoCo to make the switch. Being able to have an informed opinion would help our visibility within the project.

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I’m not sure we have sufficient people resources to add this to production right now.

Analytics have an important purpose for creating informed opinions. I don’t think spinning up our own analytics system adds much value compared to using Google Analytics, as much as I would be delighted for us to use open source tools as well.

Do we have analytics for Discourse? I’d love to know what the site traffic is (visits per day, duration on the site).

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There are but appear to only be accessible to admins. You have admin privs now and can see the admin dashboard.

Actually, I don’t think we have analytics for Discourse at the moment, although it allows entering Google Analytics information (tracking code, domain, etc.) in the admin interface. Should we consider doing this? People on Discourse Meta have also added their workarounds for using Piwik for Discourse analytics.

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