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 not growing, it 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
A single number is worse than five numbers for diagnosis and better than five numbers for noticing. The score is designed to be the thing you glance at weekly; 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 - 100: healthy. Activity and retention are both holding.
- 60 - 79: stable but worth watching. Usually retention slipping while growth masks it.
- 40 - 59: declining. Something changed - a moderation incident, a channel restructure, a competing server.
- Below 40: the community is in trouble and raw member count is probably still going up.
What it is not
It is not a benchmark against other servers, because Vorqul does not collect data from other servers. The bot is self-hosted; the only data it sees is yours. The score compares your server to its own recent history.
It is also not a target to optimise. A server that games the activity component with bot spam scores well and is still dead.