Creating List Activity Reports

Two types of list activity reports can be generated using this interface. The first report is a History report. This report simply displays the changelog records that match the selection criteria, one record per line. The second report is a Statistics report. This report allows you to reduce the changelog records to numbers, based on several different criteria. This is where you can determine, for example, how many postings were made to a given list on a range of specified dates, how many times a particular LISTSERV command was issued, and so forth. Use the two tabs to switch between the two different types of reports.

List activity reports are only available for lists that have the "Change-Log" list header keyword set to Yes and only for the time span it was enabled. Enabling changelogs in the list header will not make it possible to view past list activity. If changelogs are enabled but set to rotate over time (for example, yearly changelogs), then the reports are only available for the current year.

Generating a List Activity Report

• Select a list and click on either the History or Statistics tab to choose the type of report that you want to create.
• Choose which events to include in the report under "Report Events".
• Define the date range for the report under "Report Period".
• Optionally, you can also select the reporting interval for Statistics reports. The default is to show totals for the entire reporting period.
• Click the "Update" to button to generate the report.

Report Events

To select the events for your report, check one or more boxes under "Report Events", and then click the "Update" button to display the relevant information. To check all boxes, click on "Check All". To clear all the event selections, click on "Uncheck All".

There are a number of events that can be reported, depending on which of the checkboxes are selected. Each column heading in the report is clickable and will sort the column in ascending or descending order. A small arrow pointing up or down will appear indicating the order.

The filter row allows you to narrow the data that is displayed in the table. Operators such as = < > are all supported. For example, if you only want to see months with more than 1000 postings, type >1000 in the appropriate filter box.

Report Columns

To select the columns for your report, click on the "Show Advanced" button and select the columns of your choice. For Statistics reports, you should generally only choose one report column at a time (Event or Email Address or Details) as each value of the text field is counted independently and sorted in alphabetical order, and rows could then include unrelated values and cause some confusion. For History reports, you can choose as many report columns as you would like. If you don't have the advanced options enabled, the default is to include all columns for History reports and only the Events column for Statistics reports.

Report Period

Select the start and end dates and times for your report.

Interval

This parameter allows you to choose how to divide results in the Statistics report. You can show events divided Daily, Monthly or Yearly. The default is None, which will display aggregate totals (one row for the entire date range). This option is useful if you want to compare the number of postings per month, for example.

Report Format

This pulldown menu controls how to display the reports. For History reports, you can either display the data on screen or download it as a CSV file. For Statistics reports, you can also choose to view the data in a variety of charts, including bar charts, line charts and a radar chart. The charts are only available if your Interval is set to None.

Lines per Page

This parameter controls how many rows of data will be displayed on a single page of results. If you want to break the results into pages of 100 rows, for example, type 100 in the box and click "Update". The default is 1000.

Advanced Filtering Options

The advanced filtering options allow you to define more complex filtering criteria. There are three modes of operation:

• The Plain mode finds all matches that start with the string that you specify. This is strictly a string-search mode. Numeric comparisons are evaluated as text strings, so "100" is evaluated as less than "4".
• The Substring mode finds all matches that contain the substring that you specify. For instance, a filter for ADD would find both ADD and READD records. Numeric comparisons work as expected in this mode.
• The Exact Match mode finds all matches that are equal to the string that you specify. This is similar to the Plain mode except that numeric comparisons can be used.

Once you have chosen your filtering criteria, you may type your search terms into one or both text boxes to the right. Using both boxes defines a range, where the first box is the minimum and the second box is the maximum.

Multiple adjacent filter lines for the exact same field perform an "OR" operation on those lines. Multiple filter lines for different fields are processed with an "AND" operation.

Advanced Filtering Examples

Example 1: To get all "SUBSCRIBE" events for AOL.COM addresses in the date range specified, you could define the following filters:

Example 2: If you want to get all "SUBSCRIBE" and "ADD" events for AOL.COM addresses, you would define the following filters:

Example 3: If you want to get all "SUBSCRIBE", "ADD" and "SIGNOFF" events for AOL.COM addresses, you would define the following filters:

Example 4: Placement is important when adding filters. This example requests records where the Event field is equal to "SUBSCRIBE" OR "ADD" AND have AOL.COM as a substring of the Email Address field AND have the Event field equal to "SIGNOFF". This will never retrieve any records, since the Event field cannot be equal to two different strings at the same time.

Example 5: If you want to filter multiple date ranges, you can use the advanced filter to further filter the date range specified under the "Report Period" section. For example, if you want all "SUBSCRIBE", "ADD" and "SIGNOFF" events for AOL.COM addresses for May and September of 2018, you can make your overall date range go from May 1, 2018, to October 1, 2018, and then in the advanced filters, specify:

The Date/Time field is treated as a numeric field, so using the "Exact Match" filter and filling in both data entry fields specifies a comparison range. Putting the two date filters one after the other creates an "OR" condition. So the last two filters in this example can be read as "select records with dates ranging from May 1, 2018, 00:00:00 to May 31, 2018, 23:59:59 OR from September 1, 2018, 00:00:00 to September 30, 2018, 23:59:59".

Dates must always be specified with the format "yyyymmddhhmmss" where "yyyy" is the 4-digit year; "mm" is the month; "dd" is the day; "hh" is the hour using a 24-hour clock (00 to 23); the second "mm" is minutes (00 to 59); and "ss" is seconds (00 to 59). You must use leading zeroes. For example, May is "05" and not just "5".