Suggestion for Topic Views

[C_ind]

I think the Topic Views figures that's produced in the Statistic Center, on the admin tab in the ACP, are somewhat misleading. Perhaps it's obvious for everyone else, but I thought that topic views for a specified date range would show you how often your topic pages had been visited in that period. Not so.

At our forum I couldn't understand why the topic views for last week, scored so badly compared to previous weeks. But according to SQL code in the "statistics_show_views" function in mysql_admin_queries.php, what's really showed is how many topic views there have been for topics submitted within the specified date range. That's something completely else, and, I expect, much less interesting.

If you try to encourage members to keep discussion on a subject to the same topic, then many topics will last a long time. Say one topic started in week 1 attracts 1000 views during the first week, 1000 during the second and still another 1000 in the third week. If you then search for topic views for one of the two last weeks, no views for this popular topic would be added to the total.

Should there perhaps be a short explanation within the ACP for what "Topic Views" for a specified time period actually means?

[Arts&Faith]

The statistics have lots of problems. For example, as far as I can tell, it reports the current value of items for a period of time. For example, if you run a report showing the number of PMs from June of 2006, it actually reports the *current* number of stored PMs that are dated June 2006, not the actual number of PMs from that period--deleted PMs don't show up. It would be much better if it generated its statistics from actual logs rather than current data stores.

[C_ind]

it actually reports the *current* number of stored PMs that are dated June 2006, not the actual number of PMs from that period--deleted PMs don't show up

True, but in fairness it's clearly stated in the Statistic Center:

Note: The statistics generated are based on the information currently held in the database, they do not take into account pruned forums or delete posts, etc.

So then you know what to expect. But a short explanation of that type is what is needed for the "Topic Views" because I doubt few people know what it really computes. They'll naturally assume that they'll get statistics for how often topics have been visited over a period of time, which they're not getting.