People abusing profile views

[W13]

I *finally* switched over to the new profile and I'm loving it - except for the fact that tons of people on my forums have started 'competitions' about who gets the most views. SO, these guys put a macro to F5 all night, and in the morning they have tons more views - and all night my server has been slow and a bunch of wasted bandwidth!!!

<_<

There needs to be something built in IPB to keep the same people from amassing views.

SOLUTION!
Make a field called "Last View IP" and store the IP address of the last viewer in there, if the IP is the same, don't +1 view. (so, somebody can't consecutively go to a profile 10,000 times in a row and raise their views to 10,000).

[Morrigan]

Problem with that is if its holding the last viewer information it could be a few hours or even days since someone viewed your profile and it could be the same person that viewed your profile previously previewing it again and their new look isn't logged. I would suggest is perhaps removing the Profile views from the profile template on your site then no one would know how many anyone else had and the competition would be over. ;)

[W13]

Problem with that is if its holding the last viewer information it could be a few hours or even days since someone viewed your profile and it could be the same person that viewed your profile previously previewing it again and their new look isn't logged. I would suggest is perhaps removing the Profile views from the profile template on your site then no one would know how many anyone else had and the competition would be over. ;)

I'm avoiding a blanket ban on profile views. Thousands of regular members prefer to see profile views, but a select few are the ones causing problems. I'd hate to remove an entire feature because a few people are abusing it.

[Morrigan]

Well you can change the group for those few select members and put an if statement that bans them from seeing it but not everyone else. Unfortunately other then modifying it yourself for these "problem" members I do not see a viable use for this suggestion especially since its only "a few out of thousands" as you said.

[Digi]

I don't think there is much benefit to making this "better". I see it as the same as post spamming to get post count up. IMO, just remove the counter from the skin and people won't try to abuse it :P

[bfarber]

Or, if it's a select few abusing it, punish that select few. ;)

If you're a teacher and your class is well behaved, but 2 students keep talking or showing off, how would you handle it. You punish those two students.

Put your abusers in a new group temporarily that can't view profiles. Tell them when they can behave, they can go back to their normal group. Problem solved.

We used to monitor this via a cookie (if the cookie says the profile is the same as the last profile you visited, don't increment views) but there were technical issues we found with this.