Posters want to see how many views their Post has received

[TheWorldNewsMedia.org]

Is there anything in the works for this?

Notice I used the word "Post" and not "Topic"... since we can already see on the forum list the number of views per topic. (by the way... that should also be viewable on the actual original post view as well)

Does anyone know of an app that will already do this?

Quora has implemented it as well as Twitter 

Here is an example:

Any ideas?

[bfarber]

A tweet is equivalent to our topic, though, not to a post. It's not very feasible or useful in most cases to track post views.

[Matt]

Would be a bit tricky to know for sure. We could count the number of views per page, and assume the audience read all the posts, or we could use JS to wait until the person has scrolled into view and then count that, but that could to fire off dozens of Ajax requests per topic.

[opentype]

1 hour ago, Matt said:

… but that could to fire off dozens of Ajax requests per topic.

Yeah, doesn’t sound good. 

[Joel R]

Quora is a little different in the sense that there's an element of question-and-answer, so having more views of an answer is indicative of the popularity (and by extension, the veracity) of the answer.  Thus, I can understand if views was part of the IPS Q&A feature to count answers but i think it would be a stretch to see it benefit normal forums by counting posts.  

You would also need to take into consideration things like bot views, duplicate views, incomplete views.  

[TheWorldNewsMedia.org]

Twitter seems to think all the "topics" are worthy of stats. How do they deal with stats and bots?

We have to think about what the end users like generally (our customers) and not what we technical people dislike or find challenging.

A simple Web 1.0 forum like ours with flat topic and post still has users who want to see their post's popularity (not necessarily the topic) or else why would IPS have included "reactions" five years after FB introduced them? 

Quora is in essence a forum. A Q and A forum... but a forum nonetheless.

 

[opentype]

11 minutes ago, TheWorldNewsMedia.org said:

Twitter seems to think all the "topics" are worthy of stats. How do they deal with stats and bots?

We have to think about what the end users like generally (our customers) …

Yes, we have to think about it, consider it – not follow it blindly and build everything they want. That wouldn’t work. And the functional/technical implications also need to be considered. 

And when I consider this feature, I end up rejecting it. Too much overhead to get it done for very little use. If you need some kind of ranking for individual posts, there are Q&A forums (which sort by popularity/usefulness) and reactions (which actually show reader feedback directly). But in a strictly linear forum topic that is necessarily always opened as a full page – what good is the information of how many users “scrolled passed your post”? What does that actually tell you? Post 5 shows 230 views, post 6 shows 228, post 7 shows 220 views. Is that really of use for the people making those posts? So my post got 2 views more or less than the post above it. Great! How is that helpful?

[TheWorldNewsMedia.org]

As a follow up....

This developer has created something that shows which members have viewed a topic.

Couldn't something be made internally that show total views by everyone including guests? And in the case of those like @opentype that don't want it they can not enable the function.

 

[TheWorldNewsMedia.org]

Ok.... let me give up on asking for a count PER POST.... and I would even settle for the TOPIC views count being visible on the actual topic and not ONLY on the topic listings in the forum page/list.

Anyone else on here that would like that?