Who's viewing stuff function?, page 1

reply to post by Domo1

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Yea I don't think it would be that difficult to implement either. Even most basic sites have a tally on the bottom.

It used to be here.
Apparently it turned into a colossal PIA to implement as ATS became more popular.
www.abovetopsecret.com...

reply to post by Phage

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Tallying each individual hit on a thread (views) was originally disabled because of the amount of traffic we receive, and the resulting performance hit of writing to the database each time a thread is simply viewed. Some time later, I experimented with returning the view tally soon after we upgraded our database to the monster 16-core solid-state drive super-hero database hardware we're now running. I'm not going to revive the view-tally as it would now be irrelevant and not reflective of any meaningful number. In most cases, new threads were receiving two to three times the views from automated bots and search engine spiders than actual humans... making the tally all but meaningless as a measure of how many "people" are looking at a thread.

Well there ya go.

I agree that "bots" and "spiders" do a lot of indexing behind the scenes, cataloging content for search engines, and the only way to circumvent that would be to have ATS as an isolated community, with no outside linking. That is not desirable, however it could be possible.
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I found my way to ATS from research I was doing for a co-worker from an email he received. That's not the thread I found, but it's the same image. The critter was supposedly spotted in Ohio.

I joined the same day.
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We can't be an isolated site, separated from the inter-webs. That's silly.

We can't do without "bots" and "spiders", as ATS is ad-based. That's silly too.

This is a conspiracy site, and 90% of us are paranoid for one reason or another. Anonymity is the greatest feature here. I read far more content than I comment on here, and to have my UN posted when I visit a thread unsettles me. If I want you to know I have read a thread, I WILL post a comment. Otherwise, I read, a lot, and move along.

Something like a "footprint" or a "counter" is logistically unfeasible. It's plain silly, given the very nature of ATS. Not only silly, but a complete nightmare. You'd have to re-write the proprietary code from scratch, right, SO?

Being anonymous is important to me. I don't need a little counter. I have flags and stars, and post counts, and watts, and karma. The little counter would only serve to feed egos, another unneeded stat, because after a few thousand posts your counter would probably read in the hundreds of thousands. Maybe millions. It could never be a true indication of the content you provide as a member of ATS, nor would it truly indicate how many people actually have visited your thread. The best indication of quality content is the star and flag count.

Our peers create the content alongside us, and we also determine what we like. It's skewed, I know, but it is what it is.