# of views not "viewable" when reading a topic

[TheWorldNewsMedia.org]

Since most people on my forum land on a topic..... wouldn't it be more helpful to see # of views and currently viewing on the actual topic post header or footer?

I do like that it exists in the forum lists.

 

[clearvision]

You can add with the block side panel Recently Browsing block to the topic view to see who is viewing just the topic.

You can also add to the topic template {$topic->views} where you want to see it.

[TheWorldNewsMedia.org]

#1 I did.... the 2nd one I'm not sure how to do....

Is that in "designer's mode" area?

[clearvision]

7 hours ago, Michael Krewson said:

#1 I did.... the 2nd one I'm not sure how to do....

Is that in "designer's mode" area?

If you know HTML and a bit of CSS then it is just understanding a bit about the template system IPS uses.  It is a one line change to the topic template.  The issue is once you touch a template then you have to maintain it any time that template changes in the future, which is likely for 4.2.   This level of change though is simple enough it is probably worth doing if it is important to you and gives you a chance to learn the template system.   Pretty easy to make a copy template and assign it to just you to experiment.  You just add a template in manual mode to get access to the template and custom.css file.  

[TheWorldNewsMedia.org]

My users are driven to create content by seeing how many SHARES each one of their topics gets....

I can only imagine that # of VIEWS would also be as motivating. (It can't just be on the list of topics but right where most people land on the post. See shares below as an example)

@Rhett and @Matt Is there any way this could be built in now to 4.2 beta? 

I'm thinking it could be in gray right under FOLLOW for example.

 

[Square Wheels]

How are you displaying the number of shares?

[Rikki]

Views aren't a reliable metric, because it doesn't/can't take guest page caching into account. I don't think we'd want to put more emphasis on them.

[KT Walrus]

16 hours ago, Rikki said:

Views aren't a reliable metric, because it doesn't/can't take guest page caching into account. I don't think we'd want to put more emphasis on them.

I'd like to see Views turn into Viewers like the Voters, Followers, Reactors, etc. lists of members for each content item. To keep the size of the database table tracking viewers over time from continuously growing, I'd like to see the viewers deleted from the table after 30 days and a last_viewed field associated with each row. This table could be pruned every night (based on the last_viewed field) and a count of the active monthly users generated once a month from this table (this statistic would be available in the Member Statistics block). An active monthly user must actually view at least 1 post rather than simply logging in and checking the index page.

With this table in-place, you could support a # of Viewers (last 30 days) link for each content item that pops up a list of those Viewers. The current user should always be included in the Viewers popup, so even old content would have at least 1 Viewer in the last 30 days (once it is viewed).

[TheWorldNewsMedia.org]

@Square Wheels I use addthis.com for the shares.

@Rikki we aren't looking for exactness.... users like to see how many times their posts were opened. Twitter and FB both do it.  We do it already on our topic listing pages.

@KT Walrus you are very technical.... thank god for people like you.... for the rest of us... we just want it to work. ;-)

 

The more views on a post the better.  It makes one feel as if they made a dent in the Universe. (I know, I know... it's not true). But it is motivating to the average person.

[clearvision]

We moved from 3 to 4 a month ago.  One contributor to our site can get 2000 views a day (95% guests).  His topics dropped to 600 to 700 views because of guest caching in 4.  He was not happy (although we are thrilled because of reduced cost of IPS hosting as our number of users they calculate dropped by 2/3).  I had to show him Google analytics results that he was still getting same number of views.

So technically it is possible to still track overall views, but would require javascript Ajax requests from the cached pages to get them.  There are also several other ways to view posts now with popups in forum view and activity streams that don't get counted as views, so in the long run it is probably a losing cause to worry about view counts.