I've been relying on the "Topic View" stats provided in the ACP for quite a while now. I run a busy forum and I need good stats. I enjoy using the IPS stats because it's easy to track the total topic views PER FORUM PER MONTH, which I can't really do in Google Analytics.
But I was apparently wrong about the "Topic View" stats. That's NOT how they really work, and IPS has never made this clear.
I suspected a problem with the stats about 6 months ago, so I opened a support ticket. One of my forums received 10 topic views that month, but I knew I had visited more than 10 times by myself alone! Tech support said I had some conflicting tasks that were preventing the ibf_topic_views table from pushing its results over to the ibf_topics table.
But a couple months later I kept noticing weird inconsistencies in the stats. One particular topic received 13,000 views in April (according to Google), but the "Topic View" stats only showed 2000 views for that forum. How could this be?
I opened another support ticket and about a day later I had my answer... Rather misleading? Incredibly misleading! This revelation pretty much renders the feature completely and utterly useless. I passed my sentiments along in the support ticket, and IPS agrees that it's useless.
But will it be fixed in 3.0? No. I am very, very disappointed. In the least, IPS needs to label this feature properly. Explain how it really calculates views and how pointless the data really is.