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Add option to limit segments to specific dates or to automatically disable segments after certain dates/time spans #18682

Open Starker3 opened 2 years ago

Starker3 commented 2 years ago

It would be quite useful for users to be able to create a segment that would only be used or valid for a certain period of time.

There are often times when users create a segment that is only beneficial for the time period when a certain marketing campaign is active. It would be good to have a few options when creating the segment to be able to set a specific date or time period for when the segment can be automatically disabled/deleted. This would prevent the segment from continually needing to be archived past a certain date.

There will also likely be a lot of users that would still want access to these segments that were created for a certain time period or for a specific date range. So adding the option of being able to "Disable" the archiving for a specific segment could be very useful. There are likely many cases where people created a segment for a specific time period and kept the segments active in order to refer back to the reports in the future for whatever reason. Is such a case, Matomo would continue to try and archive the reports for the segment, taking up valuable time in the archiving process.

For the disabling of segments I think it would be useful to have it either as something that can be configured for a specific date or time period but also to be able to disable archiving for a segment whenever necessary in the UI without deleting the segment.

bx80 commented 2 years ago

So this sounds like three new options for a segment:

Would it be a good idea to have some sort of warning sent before automatically deleting data? (maybe the marketing campaign was extended since the segment was created?)

Should there be some visual indication for a segment with archiving disabled that it will only show data up to a certain date? (to avoid confusion when a segment suddenly starts showing no data)

Starker3 commented 1 year ago

We have another request for this from a Matomo user:

Several of our users create "experimental" segments and custom reports, and many of them are abandoned but remain active in the system, taking up valuable processing resources. While I regularly ask users to delete custom reports and segments that are no longer needed, this approach does not work well.

Since I don't want to simply delete the experimental reports / segments that I suspect are no longer used, it would be good to have an option to disable / re-enable them. Disabling would keep the so far archived reports, but would not process them in future runs.

Disabled custom reports or segments should be visibly marked, e.g. with a different font color or an icon so they are easily recognizable.

Refs PG-1575