No, you’re not misunderstanding – that’s exactly what the List Activity Reports are for, but the list-level change-logs collect more data than just adds and deletes – more importantly, they contain records for each posting to the list (the POST event). (It’s probably more obvious when you look at a History report as opposed to a Statistics report, which shows individual records from the change-log rather than just summary totals for each event you’ve configured the report to display.)
Now, that said: LISTSERV doesn’t enable change-logs by default because they can become quite large if you have very active lists with lots of subscribers. With the change-logs enabled, you can get statistical data in the List Activity Report such as
Event
Count
POST
164
SIGNOFF
12
SUBSCRIBE
3
DELETE
1
which is actual data from one of my lists over the last six months, and sounds like the sort of thing your list owner wants. But without the change-logs, you simply don’t have this data available and there is nothing available to create a report.
Bottom line, add “Change-Log= Yes” to the list header, wait a week for some data to build up, and then going forward she’ll be able to construct a report for the previous week using the reporting interface. Unfortunately, data prior to enabling change-logging is lost to the reporting interface, so she’ll have to be content with “going forward”.
You can also set the change-logs to rotate on a regular basis (Yearly/Monthly/Weekly – if the documentation still says “Daily”, that’s incorrect, that option doesn’t exist) so they don’t get too huge, but if you do that, you need to be aware that LISTSERV will use only the latest change-log to create reports. For example, we have lots of folks who rotate their change-logs annually and suddenly can’t generate December reports in January – because last year’s log has been rotated out and a fresh one started. Luckily, the fix for that is just to concatenate the previous period’s log and the current log under the current log’s name, so LISTSERV can see both sets of events again.
I would personally question the need to rotate change-logs unless they become so huge as to become unmanageable, or threaten to fill up the disk, but the list I referred to up above has change-logs going back to 31 Jan 2004, and they total just over 10MB on disk. The list has 1200 subscribers but it used to have over three times that many, and lots of posts daily, and 16 years and 7 months of change-logs is only 10MB? That’s not too bad 😊 But of course, your mileage (and available disk space) may vary.
Nathan
From: [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]> On Behalf Of Gray, Nathan W - graynw
Sent: Thursday, September 03, 2020 1:00 PM
To: LISTSERV List Owners' Forum <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: List activity reports not working
It is not but I thought that Change-Log was only referring to subscriptions (adds, deletes, etc) for the users themselves. Is that correct? She wants metrics as in “How many posts did we get last week?”. Am I misunderstanding what List Activity Reports is for?
Thanks
Nathan W. Gray
[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>
From: LISTSERV List Owners' Forum <[log in to unmask]> on behalf of Nathan Brindle <[log in to unmask]>
Reply-To: LISTSERV List Owners' Forum <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Thursday, September 3, 2020 at 12:51 PM
To: "[log in to unmask]" <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: List activity reports not working
Is change-logging enabled for that list? E.g.,
Change-Log= Yes
enables list-level change-logging and would provide the data she is looking for. Unfortunately, if change-logging is not currently enabled (which is the default), there won’t be any data to report on, and enabling it provides data only from that point forward.
Nathan
From: [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]> On Behalf Of Gray, Nathan W - graynw
Sent: Thursday, September 03, 2020 12:41 PM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: List activity reports not working
Greetings folks
I have a list co-owner that wants to gather some activity reports for her list. When clicking on the “List Activity Reports” link, she chooses her criteria (date, interval, report format) but no data shows up.
“There were no entries matching your reporting criteria. Please check your date range and any filters and try again.”
When choosing the Interval (makes no difference which one) and clicking on the “?” button, this shows up for me:
[included graphic removed so the message could make it through the SEARN peer, which does not allow attachments]
Selecting History shows the same error when choosing a date range (no Interval button for History).
I’m still learning the 17.0 interface. I’ve checked the manual but didn’t see anything in there related to list activity, just server activity. Thoughts?
Thanks
Nathan W. Gray
Systems Administrator
Campus Card Services
James Madison University
[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>
540-568-2879
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