The author, David G. Simmons, wanted to measure and monitor community engagement on Discourse with InfluxDB. He found that Discourse provides some rudimentary monitoring, but using their APIs to get data in a new way was more effective. After reverse-engineering the API and parsing JSON objects, he wrote Node.js code to fetch the data and insert it into InfluxDB. The author successfully automated the collection of statistics, such as user visits, topics with no response, and cumulative totals, which can now be visualized on a dashboard for management to see. This project has freed up time for the author to focus on other tasks, and they invite readers to join their community and start participating.