The five components
Activity measures how much of the server actually talks: the share of members posting at least occasionally, measured against a fraction of the total member count rather than against raw message volume, so one very chatty channel cannot inflate it. Weight 25%.
Retention compares the members who were active in the current window against those active in the window before it. A server that gains 200 members a month and loses 190 is churning. Weight 25%.
Engagement is measured from XP earned in the period against what a server of that size would be expected to earn, so a small server and a large one are scored on the same curve. Weight 20%.
Growth is recent joins against the growth expected for the size of the server, again normalised so a server of 300 and a server of 30,000 are comparable to themselves. Weight 15%.
Toxicity is the only component that is inverted: it is measured from moderation activity, and the score uses 100 minus that value, so fewer incidents means a higher contribution. Weight 15%.
Every component is a sub-score on the same 0-100 scale, and the overall score is their weighted sum. Read together they behave like a funnel: people arrive (growth), start participating (engagement), keep talking (activity) and stay (retention), while toxicity says what the experience was like on the way through.
- Activity: 25%
- Retention: 25%
- Engagement: 20%
- Growth: 15%
- Low toxicity: 15%
Why one number
For diagnosis one number is worse than five, and for noticing it is better. The score is the thing you glance at weekly, and the breakdown is what you open when the glance shows something moved.
Both are shown. In Discord, /info serverhealth prints the overall score with the components underneath, each as its own bar, plus recommendations for whichever component is below 50. The dashboard shows the same data with its history.
Reading the score
- 80 to 100: healthy. Activity and retention are both holding.
- 60 to 79: stable but worth watching. Usually retention slipping while growth masks it.
- 40 to 59: declining. Something changed, such as a moderation incident, a channel restructure or a competing server.
- Below 40: the community is in trouble and raw member count is probably still going up.
Limits of the score
Other servers do not enter into it, because Vorqul collects no data from them. The bot is self-hosted and sees only your data, so the score compares your server with its own recent history.
Optimising for it backfires. A server that games the activity component with bot spam scores well and is still dead.