Topic: View Counter of each Reply (Read 341 times)

It could be compared to adding view counts to every comment in YouTube videos, Facebook posts, and Twitter Tweets. Although it has a functionality of knowing how many views a comment got, it does not have enough relevance, so it wasn’t implemented.

In my opinion, view count feature should only be implemented to modules/systems where there are people that validates other’s activities, a task/project management software for example.

Haven't found a clear display count formula ever posted by mods, the solution will be more difficult if you wanna calculate independently. Imo the number will be far less than the number of views currently being tallied and for anyone with an interest in traffic probably won't be picking up on the results from unique visitors.

Actually i was just thinking about first one mean only View counter. and i was thinking only unique view will be counted. i was thinking it will be helpful to see if how much users viewed my post but reading all replies from Experts now i think its just increasing traffic to this forum and it will not get specific result that i want.

i observe that thread views are counted by number of time and its not based on unique visitor to Thread. js there any way to Check unique visitor?

When you mentioned the "unread messages" aspect, it got me thinking. So I went to dig deeper into this subject.

Unfortunately, the information I found is not very clear, as it implies that there are several ways for this information to be recorded, to avoid the accumulation of data.

The clarification I found most logical on the subject was here: https://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=212330.msg1670919#msg1670919

From what I understand, SMF has a table in the database, which registers entries every time a user enters the topic.

Sorry, I was wrong about this issue. I apologize! 

I'm not entirely sure, I've never really taken enough notice on how the unread posts work, and can't verify it right now due to recently marking all posts as read. I'll keep an eye out in the following days. Since, the forum has to keep track of unread posts somehow, I'm wondering to what extent does it log to keep track of that. Whether, it's done page by page or not.

Possibly, obviously the information on that page is rather vague. Doesn't really say exactly what's being recorded to the database, and what isn't. I imagine the forum hasn't been altered too much from the original Simple Machines in this regard. Obviously, it has been heavily modified, but I'm not sure if theymos would've made changes to this specific behaviour compared to the default, so we could potentially take a look at how SMF does it by default. Whether, it records each individuals access to each page.

However, the other entry is obviously easy to identify what sort of information is stored, which is pretty standard on most forums.

This suggests it does:
This pretty much confirms it:
From my interpretation (especially the part I've made bold within the quote), the second quote confirms that it keeps track of each user viewing a thread, since it suggests you can kind of obfuscate this via marking all existing threads as read. So, while it doesn't record in to a text file in the example you've given, it does record each thread a user has visited. The forum isn't doing anything with that, and you're quite right if you were too display who has visited a thread along the lines of what the OP was suggesting, it would quickly rack up the storage required since you'd need to store it for a lot longer than the forum current does. Since, the logging that is done currently, gets cleared after a while, so it's not a big deal:

For the sake of being anonymous i think it is better to always have it as it has been, since we can see the numbers of views without knowing who is viewing and not commenting, you can't even know who view your post and reported it, some features were there just to be left as it is because of privacy, since we only have the right to see those giving a reply under the thread, this viewing features is what is common with other social media networks like Facebook, whereby you know who view your comments or status posts, this is why bitcointalk is different from social media networks.

This obligatorily store a lot of irrelevant information.

Imagine that this information was recorded in a txt file. Each topic had to have a file. And each time a user enters the topic, his name is registered in the file.
We have topics with more than 100,000 views, which would require that text file to have 100,000 lines, each with the name of a user.
That made that file occupy 1 or 2 MB. If we multiply that by 100,000 topics, we're talking about 100 GB of information, just to say which users visited a topic.

Do you really think that any site will waste 100 GB to store this type of information?
Only do this if it is something very important for your operation, otherwise not.




Yes. This type of record is normal on all servers, this information is not linked to the forum database. That is, normally it is not possible to link this data with the DB information.

The explanation on that page makes sense: "Regularly use the link which marks individual sections or the entire forum as read" to reduce this logging. Without this, I couldn't use the (very convenient) new button to jump to the latest unread posts.
However, logging which topics were read doesn't mean I've seen all posts. I don't think the forum stores which pages of the Wall Observer I've seen.

Isn't this just normal web server behaviour?

The way it counts total number of views is not accurate. Views don't indicate that X amount of people viewed the thread, they just show that thread was visited/refreshed by X times. One can refresh thread and abuse that number. To my mind, it would be better if thread views were counted as one for each IP instead of one per refresh.

And what you say, can't be implemented on this forum because forum software is outdated. Even if we could to implement view counter, I think that would require much work, we definitely wouldn't be able to know who actually read it and who just scrolled down. Imagine Facebook or Youtube implementing view counter for comments, would be very useless, doesn't really matter. What matters is how much people viewed the thread and if we modified view numbers as one view per IP, that alone would be a good option.

Too complex and gimmicky.

Like how would each reply view count, if a viewer scrolls past a bunch of replies? Anonymous visitors count? Etc...


No doubt about it.

My websites used to have those social sharing widget which slides from the side of the pages and that thing took a whole chunk of extra loading time. Had to get rid of it.

I don't see how it would be useful. Regarding second example, I don't think it's got anything to do with decentralization and this forum ain't it anyway. Have seen similar feature on some sites and they increase page loading times.

Yes, that information exists but not in the way the OP says, and that's not even how it's implemented.
One thing is the statistics system of a site/server. It logs all visitor IPs from all pages. And it is this information that I understand is recorded, as the privacy page says.

What the OP suggests, is the forum's database, record all the usernames of those who visit the topic. Of the various forum systems I've worked with, I've never seen one doing that type of registration. I believe it is possible, but only in very small forums that this is viable.

One thing is to list all the IPs that visit a site page. That's a simple list.
Another thing is to keep the information that users A, B, and C visited topics X, Y, and Z.

Attention, I am not saying that it is not possible, I am just saying that it is something that forces you to store a very large number of information, which is 99% of cases is completely unnecessary.

Even though it's something possible to do, I don't know anyone who has done it. But, I admit I could be wrong.

So I have serious doubts that this type of registration is done here. At the very least, there is a log record of all the visits that a page has, which is not even linked to the forum DB and in turn, it will not be possible (or difficult) to link the two pieces of information to each other.

But then, I'm an administrator and I could confirm. I could be wrong.

There would be too much data to store and the method to accurately pinpoint how many views a reply got for desktop/mobile scrolling would require too much unnecessary functionality. If it were to just increase the view count of all replies based on page visit, that would be a little easier to implement but inaccurate (as I might visit a page but not read all replies, so counting my reply view is not accurate). It's a good idea in theory, in a world where real-time user experience and functionality precision are at a maximum with no expense to resources or required code. We aren't in this world here on BitcoinTalk yet (I don't think any forum software is, just yet), let alone majority of the web.

I know for a fact that some forums do store this information, since I've dabbled in forum software before. However, I can't remember the default implementation of Simple Machines software. Although, that doesn't matter, as I pointed out the privacy page suggests that this sort of information is stored, albeit not for very long. While it's not specific, I suspect the two entries:That's why it's removed periodically from the database, likely pruned automatically for the most part.

I have serious doubts that any forum does this type of registration.
This is because he needed to register all users who visit the topic in the BD. For example, this topic alone already has more than 100 views, that means that he had to register all those 100 views. This would greatly increase the BD as literally unnecessary information.

I'm not saying it's impossible, I'm saying it's highly impossible for some forum to register this information. Because it would weigh too much on the database unnecessarily.

The system calculates number of views of a thread by clicks on the topic I guess, the system can detect comment views by number of people that scrolled pass the comments. I assume is what social media like twitter does to calculate number of views on comments. Though I have not seen any forum script that enables such features and it's not necessary except advertisers on the forum wish to see such algorithm and stats, but I don't see any need for that since they can calculate number of link clicks to their website. Besides, forum users are not seeking for followers, so such feature may not matter.

I also think that it's not possible or even if there is some sort of changing the backend how would the system effectively distinguish that whether a particular user has read a certain post or just opened the page? You see when you enter a thread then it can be checked that how many unique users have checked into that list but suppose you opened the second page of that thread and read two or three posts and not the rest 17 so how will system check that you have read those posts not the others which is main part of this.So this is not possible in my opinion.

This is likely already done too some extent. A lot of forum software tends to log what users have looked at. Whether or not theymos has that enabled still or if it was disabled when the other statistics were disabled, I'm not 100% sure, but they likely do get wiped periodically due to the storage issues that could arise, since for the most part it would be useless information.

It speaks about page, and thread views in the privacy page. They're only kept for a few weeks though, obviously to prevent unnecessary storage usage. Plus, there usefulness is likely diminished past a few weeks anyhow. Thread views are kept for Log of all viewed topics as far as I know means viewing threads though, so that could stay on the database until deleted.

So, yeah this information is already captured, but isn't publicly released. Do note though, determining whether a individual post within a thread/page has been viewed isn't possible with the languages that SMF uses, unless significant changes were made.

What the OP wants is to have a record of users who have entered a thread.

But I can inform you that this is impossible to do without resorting to configurations in the database, something very unlikely to happen.

For this type of registration to be done, the BD needs to register whenever a user enters the topic. This type of log would further fill the database with content that is irrelevant to using the forum.

In addition, this could jeopardize the privacy of users, since many could not enter some topics in order not to be registered. It is already possible to obtain so much information about the behavior of users on the forum, that I think this is irrelevant.

How would you measure a view to a reply within a thread? The replies are all loaded at once, and as far as I know you wouldn't be able to differentiate between loading the page, and scrolling over a post. You could potentially get individual post counts for each page, but I don't see the benefit to that. At least, not with the current forum software, and the languages it uses. Possibly to add something like this with Javascript or React. However, it would drastically change how forum pages are loaded. It's a pretty huge undertaking, and affects things like ignored users too.

Also, as for the suggestion of showing who's viewed your posts; some users probably prefer to have privacy of what they're viewing, and therefore not made public. Obviously, the forum likely logs what you're viewing, but for that information to be public? I imagine it'd cause more drama than being useful, especially when concerning scam accusations, and what not.

It's a pretty insubstantial thing to add which probably wouldn't have too many uses, and those that did use it probably wouldn't use it beyond it being a gimmick, and would likely forget it even exists after the initial novelty factor has worn off. Also, displaying a ton of users would likely limit the usefulness of it anyhow, since thousands of users could be viewing your thread.

Which, would take a whole lot of work to get that to display. How, would you even determine what counts as a view. Someone, opening a thread, and then exiting isn't exactly viewing all the posts to a thread.

Right, however even if you determined scrolling down, and the post being read by the user; programming that would be difficult, I'm not even sure there's much you can do for it unless you want to heavily impact the performance of the forum. Usually, the forums pages are loaded, and then that's it. There's no dynamic element to it, whereas this would require a dynamic page in order to look out for certain actions that would count as a view.

They can do that several other ways; including a referral link in the signatures or simply looking at thread views, and taking something like 10% of that figure for an estimate. However, ultimately what matters to them is that sales are going up, since they've been advertising. However, signatures definitely work; I've gotten many personal messages asking for more information about what's in my signature.

The same problem exists though, without drastically changing how the forum functions; this wouldn't be possible, since at the moment every page is loaded at the same time, and therefore every reply is loaded at the same time. You don't need to actually read/view a reply for it to count in the current implementation.

Possible with Javascript, but not with php as far as I know. I think it goes without saying why we don't want to see Javascript being added to the forum just for the sake of a cosmetic feature. Most users here likely have Javascript disabled, which would technically render this feature useless anyhow.