Thread Views

[Moogs]

Someone has probably mentioned this before but our forum home pages need to count the poster's viewings (initially) as one view, no matter how many times he/she goes in to add links, correct typos, etc.

I know there's a preview button, but I've been to other forums where , if you view a given thread a bunch of times within a short time-span, it only counts each time-span series as one viewing. This is particularly useful during the time between the posting of the thread itself, and the first response (could be 24 seconds, or 24 hours).

If the author goes back to correct things, that shouldn't be counted over and over IMO.

THe negative part of having every single view counted and posted is that people will look at a thread sometimes and mistakenly think lots of people have read and ignored it, when many of the viewss might be from the poster....

[Brad]

Changing from a true one-view-per-view to a more esoteric one-view-per-view-except-time-constricted-edits-or-some-other-circumstance would not only be potentially confusing, it would also be a major pain in the pass to code.

I think the benefits don't really outweigh the enormous undertaking to get this working correctly. What other forums have you seen this behavior implemented? Were they running vB3? If you can find a vB mod that does this, I'll be happy to look it over and see if it's worth the trouble. Something to keep in mind, of course, is that it may break (maybe badly depending on how it's coded) when we update our software.

Besides, I don't think people are bothered by slightly inflated view counts. If anything, the view number is just a general indication of a thread's popularity. I can't even remember the last time someone commented about a thread having some view and no replies.

[Paul]

well... there is a way around having to hack a solution, but it involves allowing general users access to a currently mod/admin-only feature (I think anyway)...

You know the hyperlink for the replies: http://forums.applenova.com/misc.php?do=whoposted&threadid=2715
what about having a similar link for views... something like: http://forums.applenova.com/misc.php?do=wholoaded&threadid=2715

that has to be an option somewhere... :devil:

[Moogs]

Brad,

I don' think it would be worth your time if it were a huge project. My assumption was that it might be fairly easy / automated to implement?

The VB forum that seems to do this well is "photography review". (http://forums.photographyreview.com/index.php?) AFAICT, every view you make after you post (but before the next person posts) is counted as one. I don't know if there are time restrictions in their code or not, but I like the way it works in general.

I think it results in a more accurate idea of responses as a percentage of views (or viewing "sessions" if you want to look at it that way), so you can know how members generally reacted without getting all the extra views thrown in the mix.

[LoCash]

The reason we don't like to hack vBulletin php code is not always necessarily because it would take a lot of time, but rather it is twofold...

1) We don't know what our changes would break
2) Whenever a new update is released to vBulletin, when we install it our changes to the php scripts are wiped, and we have to go back in and re-insert our code. Then we have problem #1 to deal with again.

It's just not productive.

[Moogs]

Roger that.