Growing Successful Communities
Despite the robustness of Lithium's Metric tools, there are certain situations in which a customer may want to exclude an area of their community from incrementing particular metrics. Such situations may include:
- A private board that you would rather not have skewing your community's metrics.
- An off-topic area in your community that you wish to exclude from counting towards users' post counts so that the area does not overtake other, more important areas that are the focus of your community (think "Top Boards" module).
An often-overlooked feature in the Admin Panel (Community/Category/Board/Blog Admin > General Settings > Feature Settings > Skip message metrics) is the "Skip message metrics" toggle. By enabling this feature at various levels of your community, you can effectively exclude the following metrics from being incremented in the area(s) of your choice:
- Threads
- Message Posts
- Blog Articles
- Blog Comments
- Attachments Metrics
*Note that this only applies to messages posted to the board, category, or community after the setting has been set to true, not to any messages moved there or posted while the setting was false.
As a final word of caution, I would like to point out that this feature should be used only if you plan to exclude such content from the metrics permanently. Just as content posted before the toggle is applied will not be affected by enabling the feature, content posted during this feature being enabled will not be counted once the toggle is disabled.
