Communities Lab guide

Start with the sample

Open the sample for two saved searches around an invoicing idea, with twelve months on each source. It works offline.

Add a search and check

Add a phrase. The Lab searches Hacker News, one Stack Exchange site and GitHub issues. Press Check now to see the request count and the time estimate before it runs. A month already fetched today is skipped. If a community asks for a slow-down, the check continues more slowly, and a GitHub wait is named.

The views

• Pulse: mentions per month, one lane per source on a shared month axis, each with its own scale and a note saying exact count or sample. Spike months are marked.
• Unanswered (Stack Exchange): questions plotted by age and views, with state: no answer, answered but not accepted, or accepted. High views and still open is the corner to read.
• Most wanted (GitHub): issues by reactions against age, with open feature requests ringed, so a young request with many reactions stands out from an old one that had time.
• Discussions (Hacker News): points against comments, split into Ask HN, Show HN and plain stories. High comments on few points is an argument. High points on few comments is a link people liked.
• Pain themes: rule-based families such as missing feature, broken, slow, confusing docs, price, integration, manual work and frustrated, counted across the sources with a split by source and example quotes.
• Changes: new items per source since the last check. The first check is the baseline.

Pin, watch and ask

Pin a story, question, issue or a theme with its quotes to the evidence board. Turn on the weekly re-check (only while Desktop is open). Every action is an MCP tool: see the Communities Lab group in the tools reference.