Solved How to report on userlist and subscriptions

Do any versions of Kunena include a facility to report on the userlist and what categories users are subscribed to?

If so, what versions? How do you do this?

Alternately, can anyone suggest an SQL statement (table names/fields) to extract this information from the database?

For our customer forum, we would like to find who is subscribed to what so that Account Managers can encourage those customers who are not, to logon and subscribe.

I suppose the reverse of this would be, are there any versions of Kunena, where the administrator can subscribe users to categories as part of user management?

Thanks,
Annabel

I am going to make a blind leap of faith here ans assume that, in the four months since this question was asked, either your needs have changed or that you have found some way to resolve the matter. I am marking this topic as resolved and moving it to the archive.

No, this question was never resolved. Still different parties want to know who is signed up to what.

For example, an special interest group Convenor might want to check all members are signed up and encourage those who haven't to do so.

I imagine we could go into the database and construct an SQL query to do this. However, on our fairly small site it is a question many staff members and customers have asked. Hence, I wondered if it a common request for many sites.

It is a very uncommon request (as far as Kunena is concerned) but there are other ways that you can categorise your members and produce different lists about their special interests.

If we eliminate the requirement to look at what forum categories (or topics) members may have subscribed themselves to, and focus only on the requirement to produce different user lists based on other demographic criteria, there are other Joomla extensions that can do that (assuming, of course, you have a way of collecting the data in the first place).

As you would probably realise, there are several ways that you can profile the people who join your Joomla site. Of course there is the standard Joomla account - this does not collect much information except the user's name and email address - although you can (if you're clever enough) extend the range of information that you obtain in the Joomla account. Then there are social networking extensions (e.g. JomSocial and Community Builder) that use their own proprietary mechanisms (i.e. database tables) to store information about certain attributes of a user (e.g. avatar image, gender, date of birth, etc.) and, from what I remember of these products, they can be extended to collect other information, too. These products may also have the built-in ability to report on that information (e.g. produce a report of all the people who are male or female) and you should investigate what kinds of reporting features suit your purposes.

As far as Kunena is concerned, there is just the standard user list. You can sort the list in several different ways (e.g. sort in descending order of date joined to find out who were your most recently signed-up members) and you can also include (or exclude) certain data fields kept in the Kunena user profile. Yes, it is possible to modify Kunena to add other data items and to include these other data items in the user list, but it's not easy. To add other data items involves modifying the _kunena_users table in the database and to generate an interface for the users to update those additional columns in the database ... and then you have to modify the source code - the PHP programs - to be able to report on those new columns. These kinds of modifications are best left in the hands of skilled software developers.

It would be lovely if Kunena had the same degree of flexibility as JomSocial or Community Builder as far as custom user profiling is concerned. If Kunena possessed similar functionality to other social networking extensions there would probably be little need to use something else (like JomSocial or CB). But the simple fact is that Kunena is primarily a web-based discussion forum component for Joomla (and CB and JomSocial are primarily user profiling components ) and, while Kunena does the forum very well (in my opinion, of course), it may not do the user profiling stuff as well as products geared towards the niche "user profiling" market. Different horses for different courses and all that.

The Kunena team would like to develop a user profiling system that integrates seamlessly with the forum component (if we had the time and the money to do it) but the main objective (as far as what we can do within the limits of time and money) is not about user profiling. Yes, we all agree, the Kunena user profiling features can be improved; they should be improved! Some of the user profiling data is out of date now (e.g. do people still use ICQ any more? : :laugh: ) and we could debate for months on end what data is useful and what is not.

Forgive my long-winded commentary - some of which may be off-topic - but I thought it worthwhile to explain what's going on behind the scenes. We receive many requests for improvements - many inspirational ideas that members of the community have contributed to improving Kunena - but people should also understand that we have a duty to priority between those things that some people consider "highly desirable" features and those mattest that are achivable given our situation. There is no company behind Kunena; everyone who contributes to Kunena is a hobbyist, enthusiast or professional web developer who gives their time freely to this project - volunteers every one of us. Our goal is to make Kunena the most reliable, scalable, durable and robust forum component for Joomla that we can make it and to give people the best solution to meeting their forum needs. The forum is a self-help community-driven resource for users to help one another. Our job, in moderating the forum, is not necessarily to answer every question but, rather, to point people in the right direction where they can find the answers and, for those who find their solutions, to share the solutions with one another.

On your more general question about checking who is "signed up" to what and encouraging members to do whatever it is that you might want them to do, we've had a few recent discussions about that. Here are a couple you might be interested in:

• How to help people realise that there are important messages posted on my forum?
• Force to upload avatar: Config Option
• Several how-to questions (Q1 of that topic)

Ultimately, however, the short answer to the original question "Do any versions of Kunena include a facility to report on the userlist and what categories users are subscribed to?" is no. People can develop their custom modules (using custom SQL statements) to extract the data and display the information.