Question Threadviews (technical question)

[PsionicCuttlefish]

I was wondering, could Vek or anyone else involved with the nuts and bolts of the site explain how the viewcount on a thread is counted, in its exact technical details? I'm curious about how it calculates that, and what constitutes a "new view".


Additional question: Was the method of counting different before the XenForo upgrade?
Additional question 2: If yes to the above, what also was that system and how it worked?

Purely just curious about How This Works on a whim. I like knowing numbers stuff like this.

 

[Vekseid]

Xenforo tracks views by how many users actually look at a thread. For people not logged in, IIRC it is based on session.

MyBB was a bit more loose with it, either purely session based like SMF (on Elliquiy) or perhaps a bit looser even.

 

[PsionicCuttlefish]

Hm, so if you're logged in and you look at a thread, no matter how many times you look at it again, you don't add to the viewcounter? Counts only unique views (for those logged in)? Hmm, I see. I noticed multiple threads that had viewcounts that near-exactly matched their postcounts, so I guess that was just a funny coincidence. Hah.


And ah, I suspected that was how it worked with the old forum. Personally, I actually kinda like that better in a way, it gives one an idea of how often your thread is being read by others indirectly, simply by dividing viewcount by postcount for the average views per post, heh... (that is not actually a request for things to be changed back to that, I don't know if it's even plausible and it's a totally trivial thing anyway)

 

[Vekseid]

Xenforo also only updates the viewcounters every 15 minutes or whatever, so especially for new threads they will undercount.

 

[greybishop]

Hi! Since I can be a bit of a stats guy at times, I can appreciate this question and an Admin taking the time to answer it; thanks!

FWIW over time I've noticed that different software tracks views in different ways, which can be confusing for numbers folks. One thing interesting I've noticed about this Forum is that the Semiprivate Roleplays often (but not always) have Views equal to one more than Replies - so basically one View per Post (since Post 1 is Reply 0) which strikes me as kind of odd. (Since that implies that the only time these threads are being viewed is when one of the participants are posting - which seems to be happening far too often. Even a comparatively lackluster story is going to get at least some exploratory views.)

 

[Vekseid]

It's entirely possible the cron to count views is borked somehow, I'd need to check the code to see what exactly is up.

 

[PsionicCuttlefish]

Huh. Well...if you'll be checking out the code at some point anyway, put me down as a "vote" for desiring a per-session viewcount like we had before on MyBB if that is feasible, for whatever that's worth. x3

But I do know you are WAY busy with a lot more important things in the site's inner workings, so this isn't really a strong request or push for that. Merely voicing my personal opinion on the matter. (I am aware it is possible, even likely, that my opinion will have no bearing whatsoever on anything, only said it anyway just in case.)