📊 Analytics and spam protection are here

Hey, Ty here. Over the past 12 months I’ve been digging into the whatayarn product analytics behind the scenes, and it’s been super interesting. Which pages get viewed the most, how many messages get sent across the board, which channels convert really well and which ones don’t. There’s a wild spectrum, and it gives really good insight into how engaged particular audiences are.

So I thought, why keep all of that to myself? Let’s surface some of these insights in the product.

Analytics dashboard

If you want to jump straight in, go check out your analytics dashboard.

There’s a brand new Analytics tab in your dashboard. Click it and you’ll see how your channels are actually performing.

Here’s what you get:

• Page views, messages, conversion rate, and average message duration all at a glance, right at the top.
• A daily chart plotting views vs messages over time, with period-over-period comparisons so you can see if things are trending up (or if that Instagram story actually did something).
• Filter by channel if you’re running more than one, or view everything together.
• Filter by time period like last 7 days, 30 days, or all time.
• Top referrers so you can see exactly where your traffic is coming from. Linktree? Show notes? That one Reddit post? You’ll know.
• Top senders to see who’s sending you the most messages and showing up for your community.

Page view tracking has only just started, so you’ll see that data populate over the coming weeks and months. But your historical message data is already there, so you might spot some trends you didn’t expect.

You’ll find the Analytics link in the top nav on desktop and in the bottom nav on mobile. Hopefully you enjoy it as much as I do.

Rate limiting

We haven’t had too many issues with spam or abuse (touch wood), but as the product is starting to slowly grow, I thought it was a great time to harden some of the higher-traffic parts of the application.

Every public channel page now has built-in rate limiting on incoming messages. This means any single person won’t be able to send a crazy amount of messages all at once. They’ll be limited to around 10 messages every 10 minutes.

Genuine listeners won’t notice a thing. But if a bot or a troll decides to have a go, they’ll hit a “slow down” wall pretty quickly.

You don’t need to turn anything on. It’s already protecting every channel, right now.

That’s it for this one. As always, if you’ve got ideas or feedback, hit me up at hellowhatayarn@gmail.com.

Previous update: 🧶 Changelog is live

Ty Lange-Smith

Founder