I don't know whether suggestions are allowed, but if you (those who run this site) read this, would it be possible to change the code to increment the Page View stats for any thread based on the number of unique visitors and not just increment it each time someone loads the page? You know ... increment the view by 1 for each unique IP. Thanks.
What would that tell you? Once a person has posted to a thread, that person is very likely to go back for follow up. Does that make the thread's total count less important than if there were only unique IP addresses counted?
I'm curious to know how we'd be better off under your proposed plan.
Well, it gives a better idea of how popular a thread is based on number of unique people who viewed the thread. Not how many times someone loaded the thread.
For example, if a thread has spanned more than 1 page, when someone wants to check the last posts, he clicks on the thread subject in the forums, incrementing the count by 1. He/she then clicks on the last page's link, again incrementing the count by 1. So, 1 person viewing the last page increments the count by 2, which is not realistic. Imagine a thread which has spanned 5 pages, and someone reads the posts from page 1 to 5 ... the count gets incremented by 5, which, IMHO, is not realistic ... the count should be 1, because 1 person viewed the thread.
Again, this is something easy to do (tracking the IP and incrementing the count by unique visitor and not # of page views), and it gives a more realistic idea of the number of people who've viewed a thread. It can never be 100% accurate, of course, as 1 person can view the thread from different IP addresses or dynamic IPs, etc. But, IMHO, it gives a better count than incrementing the count whenever any page of a thread is loaded. And, this is just a humble suggestion from a web programmer, who thinks FM is one of the best photography-related sites on the net.
I don't mean to be obtuse...but why do we want to know how many original page viewers each thread has? What consequences are there to having that information?
I've run websites where it was important to know which stories generated more interest than others. I've seen management apportion resources by seeing which subject matter brought in more memberships. But on a laid back site like FM, I'm completely in the dark about what value there would be to knowing whether it was 17 viewers who visited a discussion of view finders, or one obsessive soul who visited that single viewfinder thread 16 times.
Does it have some relevance to the Weekly/Monthly assignments that I'm missing?
Soenda wrote:
I don't mean to be obtuse...but why do we want to know how many original page viewers each thread has? What consequences are there to having that information?
Like I said, it was just a suggestion. I run a few websites, some of them running with an Oracle 11g back-end. On some of the pages, we track how many unique people viewed the page, and not how many times a page was loaded. Fact is .. we can easily track both - number of unique visitors as well as number of page loads. IMHO, its better to know how many people were interested in a thread, than how many times each page of a thread was loaded. At the very least, it would be better if subsequent page loads (page 2 or 3 or ... of the same thread) didn't increment the count and if only the first page load incremented the count. If that's the case, then a thread with 5 pages and 1 user reading all the posts from page 1 to 5 would only increment the view count by 1.
In the Buy & Sell forum .. typical user behavior is (at least my behavior when I used to buy & sell on FM) to bookmark the page corresponding to the user's own Ad or leave the page open in a browser tab, and to frequently refresh the page to see if there are any new posts. Each of these refreshes increments the count, thereby showing a "false" number of page views. It is no big deal, of course .. but something I've always wondered about.
Does it have some relevance to the Weekly/Monthly assignments that I'm missing?
No, I haven't yet participated there. And it doesn't have anything to do with my gallery either. It was just a humble suggestion to make the view count more realistic. Once again, I think FM is one of the coolest photo-related sites, and I'm just offering a suggestion which, IMHO, would make FM even better.
It is easy to track a user's IP address. As I mentioned earlier, it is not 100% accurate as each computer you use (work, home, etc) and even when you connect from a laptop from different networks will have a different IP Address. But, it gives a reasonably accurate number of unique visitors. FM already saves cookies on users' computers for authentication, even that could be checked. For example, I log into FM from 3 different computers - my desktop, my laptop, my work desktop. FM has saved cookies on all these and whenever I visit FM, the site knows it is me.
Anyway, popularity is not an indicator of quality.
You're right. But, currently, the view count shown is way over-estimated. As you click on each page of a multi-page thread, the view count for that thread is incremented and so, that number of views you see is not at all realistic, IMHO. At least if subsequent page loads didn't increment the count, it would make more sense.
When browsing the "Presentation" section of FM forums, where people post their photos and other comment, I normally click on threads which have the most views, assuming that more people viewed it, so it has to contain good photos. Often, that is not the case, as someone can just keep refreshing their own thread, making it look like a popular thread.
I didn't see lots of users climbing on your bandwagon to get the "powers-that-be" to do anything.
Running a web site is like any other business, improved features get implemented when/if customers ask for it (especially if there's time/money investment required).
Any improvement to the site that costs time/money needs to have some return on that investment, and having a more accurate count of page views doesn't seem important to enough people to justify the expense.
Yeah .. I agree. It is not an important feature. Would have been nice if implemented though.
As for the "costs time/money" part ... any web developer worth his salt could change the code within a few hours at most to prevent reduntant counts. So, that's not the issue here. This site is very professional, well laid out and has professionals working behind it .. it shouldn't take them long at all to make such a change.
Forum threads are more or less spontaneous, not preplanned and augmented.Tracking the individual users per page would make sense if you were striving to increase viewers to that page. Since that makes little sense in a forum, I couldn't see the real advantage to doing it here.
If Fred were to decide to enhance other features on the site, it would be a totally different story. Then it would mean something if more people stopped by because of something about the page design or a particular promotion.
ontime wrote:
Solution: display both numbers. It would be interesting to see them both.
True. That'd be interesting ..
For those going aggro, his suggestion makes a lot of sense. Relax.
Thanks .. I dunno why some people got upset about a simple suggestion. Maybe they're the ones who keep refreshing their own threads to make them look popular? Just kidding, now don't massacre me.
People make suggestions when they really care about something. I won't go make suggestions on sites, which I think, are useless. I think FM's one of the best sites on photography, and I hope it keeps going as long and as well as possible.
Actually, I think it would be useful to have both - especially for those threads that begin to get dominated by 1 or 3 people having an argument. It would save me from opening threads (which may show up in "my posts") which have degenerated into bickering matches. It might also be useful for moderators to know how many people are viewing: a broad cross-section or just the same 5 combatants over & over.
