I guess the New Contributors is the best indicator of that, as it tracks the number of users who made their first post during this period.
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That seems quite high to me. Roughly half sign up and then do nothing. That must tell us something?
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I personally don’t think that’s high per se, but if you could find some numbers to compare to that would be interesting 
I would also be curious to see what percentage of those that didn’t contribute also didn’t complete the user onboarding.
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I honestly got nothing to compare it with. It just strikes me as odd that almost half of those that create an account don’t then go on to contribute in any way. They must have had a reason to create an account so why did they not use it?
Maybe preemptive registrations to preserve their brand space? Like, I’ve registered codepotent as a username on Instagram and others even though I don’t use the services.
Or maybe “I might use this one day”, or maybe they registered an account and then forgot about it / got busy with other things. Lots of possible reasons.
It’s difficult to find hard numbers about this kind of thing, but here is one: 55% of Visitors Spend Fewer Than 15 Seconds on Your Website
I think it’s reasonable to assume that the same kind of process repeats throughout a funnel, and just as a gut feeling I would say that around 50% user activity is actually pretty good.
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Ya, this was kind of my thinking from my experience with SaaS products - the funnel to a single conversion is huge so 50% signing up and becoming active in my mind sounds pretty good. But again, if there are other forum stats to compare to I would be super interested in finding out how we stack up.
This was an interesting read too: Participation Inequality: The 90-9-1 Rule for Social Features
TLDR:
Summary: In most online communities, 90% of users are lurkers who never contribute, 9% of users contribute a little, and 1% of users account for almost all the action.
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So I did find a report I could pull to find out how many people open the welcome message:
- Over the last 12 months only 7 users have opened it.
So that indicates to me we need to make adjustments there. I have already started by adjusting the text to be more clear about “starting” an onboarding experience.
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Wade, do you know how they track opens? Personally, I have my email set to not autoload images so if they’re tracking that way, they won’t pick up on me. I can’t imagine I’m the only one…
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Oh I see, sorry I wasn’t clear - it is the message you receive on the forums, it tracks when you open that.
When you first sign up you will start with 1 notification over your user avatar, that notification is the message from @discobot welcoming you and offering onboarding 
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This is my setting, as well. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was the default behavior of mail clients and apps these days.
Perhaps there’s a report that indicates who has earned the welcome-related badges over time? This might possibly give a better number of who is going through the onboarding. If users are unwilling to do the 5 minute onboarding, I would 100% expect them to have trouble using a modern piece of software, regardless of what that software did. In light of that “7 users” number, I strongly suspect that “usability” is merely a symptom, and not the underlying cause.
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I agree, and I’ll give you access to the report so you can tinker with it
From what I see it looks to see the first message sent within the same day the user registered from discobot and whether that has been “viewed”. Therefore, people who opened it and started but didn’t finish are included in that stat.
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Looks like only 2 dozen people have completed the onboarding tutorial. That’s a pretty low stat.
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And that’s “ever” not just the last 12 months. So that’s what just under 7% of the 352 users I last reported.
On that, as I mentioned somewhere, I have started a draft of the new welcome message (sent to mods for feedback), and have updated the initial message from Discobot to be more clear as well.
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If that’s the initial discobot message, I looked back and it seems I got bored of it very quickly.
I’ve just been awarded the “read guidelines” badge, but I’m sure I’ve read them before.
I mean, I didn’t find it a bundle of joy… but, it did help me to get my bearings.
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