Bring Views Back!

When I first started viewing ATS, long before I even had an account, your site used to show views.

I think it's important.

reply to post by CALGARIAN


Views as in how many people have viewed your thread?

Just asking for clarification purposes.

Peace and love.

reply to post by CALGARIAN


I think you just want to see how many people stalk you is that it?

I don't know about you, but I give two s**ts on who views me or not.

Originally posted by DirtyLiberalHippie
reply to post by CALGARIAN

 

Views as in how many people have viewed your thread?

That is correct!

reply to post by CALGARIAN


Yes, I remember the view feature. I forget why it was dumped? I thought it was helpful to gauge a threads traffic.

Originally posted by CALGARIAN

That is correct!

Ah, okay. Pardon my being on the slow side tonight.

Yeah...I would not be against it. I am happy with how things are, but I can see how it would be nice.

mods?

That particular function was disabled when it was determined it slowed the site waaaaaaay down by displaying that.

Personally, I found it to be an irrelevant number anyway, and it drove behavior we'd rather not see - i.e. writing "creative" thread titles to get someone to click on it to get the view number increased. Of course, once someone got there and saw there was nothing to it, they didn't stay long. That has an overall (again - my opinion) detrimental effect on the site. Yes, we still have some outrageous thread titles, but we no longer provide any incentive for that alone. You still need to start a thread in which people want to participate, maybe flag, before there's any impact that will drive up the attention to it.

[Edit to add]

The Overlord's explanation here.

^ Well hey, that's what I thought you were going to say

I noticed a few other forums I used to frequent done the same thing

this thread may be closed.

I liked seeing "views" back then to see what the lurkers were interested in.

What would pretty cool, is some indication that counts the conversion of lurkers to members. Like, if someone joins and replies to your thread as their first post, you get a little brownie button like a flag. I see a lot of "I joined because of this thread" replies.

Of course, that would require the return of the massive of DB writes and some non-trivial coding.

EDIT: The more I think about it, it would probably not require all the DB writes, but rather the non-trivial coding of tying a new member's first post to a thread. And many new members join because they don't agree with a thread, with no intention of rewarding the author. so... never mind.

reply to post by yeahright

Personally, I found it to be an irrelevant number anyway, and it drove behavior we'd rather not see - i.e. writing "creative" thread titles to get someone to click on it to get the view number increased. Of course, once someone got there and saw there was nothing to it, they didn't stay long. That has an overall (again - my opinion) detrimental effect on the site. Yes, we still have some outrageous thread titles, but we no longer provide any incentive for that alone. You still need to start a thread in which people want to participate, maybe flag, before there's any impact that will drive up the attention to it.

I'm not sure what you mean. I think you are talking about the view count effecting the rank of the threads.

This is just about displaying the info.

Originally posted by SLAYER69
reply to post by CALGARIAN

 

Yes, I remember the view feature. I forget why it was dumped? I thought it was helpful to gauge a threads traffic.

Could be a valuable tool, right?

Information you don't necessarily want to share with outsiders.

reply to post by QContinuum


I thought it was interesting. I can see why it was dumped though. Wasn't the trending page meant to give somewhat the same idea of which topics were hot and which were not?

reply to post by SLAYER69


I personally liked the feature. I thought it gave to a more accurate base of what people were interested in. I don';t think it's coming back anytime soon though. There's only so much you can load into the servers.

reply to post by SLAYER69


Somewhat, yes. But I think that is based more on the active members.

It was also easily exploitable. All you had to do was click in and out of a thread and it would register multiple views. Not like a flag, which you can do to a thread only once, and doesn't result in the 'facepalm' you could get when clicking on a thread with an enticing title and no content >can't believe I gave that a thread view< deal.

Bottom line, it isn't coming back anytime soon (if ever) and again my opinion - no loss. Number of flags and number of replies are much better indicators (in my opinion) than number of 'views' which doesn't even mean someone actually read anything.

No system is perfect. There's a cost/benefit determination to be made. The cost of slowing everything down far exceeded the ephemeral and perceived benefit of displaying number of views per specific thread data.

reply to post by yeahright


I don't get your reasoning, people don't look at at the views initially, it's still about the flags.

I don't see how displaying a view count would create such a problem.

Now I don't really care about it, but is it that hard?

Skeptic's explanation is from 2008.

reply to post by QContinuum


I don't have a better, or more clear way to respond. If the above didn't do it, then I'm not the one to provide an answer for you. Sorry.