Change "This Month" to display Month To Date view

[metmarkosaric]

"This Month" currently displays the full month which is not that useful, especially in the first half of the month which leaves most of the top graph empty and the comparison wrong too. If "This Month" simply shows month to date view rather than the full month would be much more useful.

(request from Twitter)

[nbgoodall]

Thank you, Marko! 🚀

[ukutaht]

Agreed 💯

[Vigasaurus]

Am I misunderstanding or is this all that's wanted here? i.e. only the graph to change? Or do we want comparisons to also reference only the subset of the previous month?

[nbgoodall]

Ideally it'd update the comparisons too, like Stripe does. The question I'd like to answer is "How does the month so far compare to the previous month?"

[Vigasaurus]

Yeah that makes sense - I'll see what I can do 👍 we may need some sort of docs explanation for that, just to make it clear the difference between selecting "this month" vs "last 30 days"

[ukutaht]

A couple thoughts here @Vigasaurus:

I'm not sure if changing the graph is necessary. I get it if people want it but personally I quite like seeing the whole month/day and how far through we are. What do you think @metmarkosaric ? Seems like I'm in the minority here which is ok :)

The main point is getting the comparisons right. If I'm looking at the stats on the 16th of Dec, it should compare against 1-16 November. I would change the name of the selection in the date dropdown to Month to date to make it clearer that's what it is.

There are edge cases where for example current month has 31 days and the previous has 29. This only kicks in at the end of the month. I haven't thought about how to solve this.

The comparison thing also applies to daily stats. If I'm looking at the stats for today at 3pm, it should compare with yesterday 12am-3pm, not the whole day.

[metmarkosaric]

thanks @nbgoodall! yeah, that makes sense to have. this issue here is more to fix the current comparison which shows wrong data as it doesn't compare to the exact time period (if you select "this month" right now, it compares 2 weeks of december to the full month of november for instance rather than same amount of time in november). so that needs to be fixed as a short term thing but we do plan to add more comparisons in the future too.

[metmarkosaric]

So basically to confirm the two different things we'd like to do:

One is that we'd like to fix the comparisons so they compare to the same exact amount of time. Currently they don't do that if the current time period is not completed so they are not so useful. So "this month" right now doesn't compare to 16 days of last month but to the full last month. same for "today", it doesn't compare to the same amount of time yesterday but to the full day yesterday. #344

The second one is that we'd like to add few more comparisons in the future to make this even more useful such as year over year. There's a thread here for those ideas: #277 . I've included your ideas there too now @nbgoodall

[Vigasaurus]

So to confirm - this specific request would just need to properly slice comparisons that cut into the current month/day -
such that instead of comparing Dec 1-Dec 16 to October 31-November 30, we'd only compare Dec 1-Dec 16 to Nov 14-Nov 30 (in the "this month" selection).
and the same for "today" selection with the split being from midnight-current hour and yesterday this time yesterday-midnight.

And then we'd leave the more accurate split on "same stretch" in the other feature with the better comparison choice?

[metmarkosaric]

Exactly. The comparison should compare to exactly the same amount of time in the previous period. This is something we don't do now and it affects many users so is of more immediate priority to fix and it will make Plausible more useful to many.

The better comparison choices we need to discuss in more detail as there are several different requests from people: we need to decide which of them to introduce (month over month, year over year, completely custom comparison to any period that you pick...), where to place them so they are easy to use/understand etc. Needs a bit more thinking before we know what to build.

[Vigasaurus]

👍 I'll work on the former for now then

[metmarkosaric]

"This Month" is now "Month to Date" with a comparison to the previous period