What's happened with our page views?

Is there some conspiracy within ATS management to make it so that we can't see how many people viewed our topics and to make it so that other people can't see how many people viewed other topics? I'm starting to think there is a sinister conspiracy as to why the management at ATS hasn't looked into this. There needs to be an ongoing investigation with the upper management looking into this.

Everyone flag this so it gets heard!

I Concur.........................................










~Hyp

The views tally has been disabled, possibly permanently.


We are exceptionally unique as far as "discussion boards" go. More than 80% (sometimes up to 90%) of all our daily traffic is from non-members. And during the month of October, we've been averaging about 100,000 visits a day, with an average page-views (of content pages) over 550,000 daily. That's a crap-load of activity.

Incrementing the views counter requires a write action to the database on every one of those page-loads. And as any database administrator will tell you, write (updates) are the most intensive tasks. We were experiencing some performance issues, and once we disabled the views-tally, the issues were cleared up.

So it's the constant balancing act of ensuring all our content is available in a fast and efficient way, along with a long list of unique services for members.



And for those keeping track who might say, "just get a bigger database server,"... we're at the upper-limit of what is available to anyone who leases machines from enterprise-class server providers (a 16-core db server with 32 GB RAM). We've been reviewing options to move to a cluster of db servers, but it requires purchasing some rather costly hardware, which is beyond our current means.

I can vouch for the database writes. I would never use a database entry for such amounts of writes on huge tables unless it was extremely important. And even then I would likely end up making a solution where it is written to a smaller table.

I once tried to log views on a database that got 2 million views a day in a server cluster. The database couldn't keep up. I ended up having to save the data to a log files, and then it was a big pain in the butt managing the files from different servers, and I needed a script to run that would read them and put them into a database.

Also, one of the settings in a forum I manage is this (IPB).

Update Topic Views Immediately How can I tell if I need this?
If enabled, the topic views counter will be updated as one loads a topic. If not enabled, the topic views will be written to another table and the topic views updated every 3 hours. This will significantly reduce overhead on the topics table if you have a very busy board as it overcomes the write lock initiated when the topic counter is updated.

Originally posted by SkepticOverlord
The views tally has been disabled, possibly permanently.


We are exceptionally unique as far as "discussion boards" go. More than 80% (sometimes up to 90%) of all our daily traffic is from non-members. And during the month of October, we've been averaging about 100,000 visits a day, with an average page-views (of content pages) over 550,000 daily. That's a crap-load of activity.

Incrementing the views counter requires a write action to the database on every one of those page-loads. And as any database administrator will tell you, write (updates) are the most intensive tasks. We were experiencing some performance issues, and once we disabled the views-tally, the issues were cleared up.

So it's the constant balancing act of ensuring all our content is available in a fast and efficient way, along with a long list of unique services for members.



And for those keeping track who might say, "just get a bigger database server,"... we're at the upper-limit of what is available to anyone who leases machines from enterprise-class server providers (a 16-core db server with 32 GB RAM). We've been reviewing options to move to a cluster of db servers, but it requires purchasing some rather costly hardware, which is beyond our current means.

Good post, maybe make it a sticky? Close it so we don't have to listen to others endless cries also. Unless this info is already a sticky but either way... good info. Thanks!

No offence, but why do you care so much about page views lol?
I mean, yes, ok more people are known to be reading your posts, but bah! What difference does it make anyway?

Seems a bit sad really... ..

i also concur with the Op

SO, i understand what u say , but it would be real nice to know how many people are reading our posts because many never post in the threads at all.

A view counter gives indications of how well a topic is recieved if not commented on.

Don't bother....

Any threads concerning conspiracy with the ATS management and it will get closed and the moderators will say "post this on the 'so and so thread' 'reports' whatever so it WILL NOT stay on the first page for long and get the attention it deserve.

EVERYTIME it's like that. It's a conspiracy folks! If there's nothing to hide they will leave the thread be but NO.

The crap useless BlossomGoodchild thread went to 200 plus page and threads such as these will be mercilessly and undemocratically locked upat the first page.

And I'm not surprised if my post will be deleted as a part of this coverup.

I'm going to make a screenshot of this thread and save it so if they locked it or delete the thread this just PROVES it's a coverup.

[edit on 16-10-2008 by spacebagel]

reply to post by Quantum_Squirrel


The only solution is what I mentioned, and that is writing the entires to a smaller table, and then transferring the totals over every few hours. If there is alot of traffic, then you can just append to the end of a log file, and parse those into the table every few hours as well, then you have 0 database writes.

I can already hear the people crying about view manipulations just like they do with YouTube because they won't update instantly.

Every time you write to a table, it locks the row(entry) you are updating. Given the amount of threads and size of these forums, with the traffic he is talking about, there is no question it's eating up a ton of resources.

I like stats, so I personally hope they do the solution.

reply to post by SkepticOverlord


You really are rocking with 100,000 visits a day. If it's going up day by day, you should show the progress to the users. Probably not in details but in %.

How about a an icon beside the thread title that appears after 1000 views or something to that effect.

Perhaps a smiley face, or a thumbs-up emote would suffice.

Then we can all fell good that we got so many hits on our thread that we got a smiley face beside the title.

Originally posted by spacebagel
Don't bother....

Any threads concerning conspiracy with the ATS management and it will get closed and the moderators will say "post this on the 'so and so thread' 'reports' whatever so it WILL NOT stay on the first page for long and get the attention it deserve.

EVERYTIME it's like that. It's a conspiracy folks! If there's nothing to hide they will leave the thread be but NO.

The crap useless BlossomGoodchild thread went to 200 plus page and threads such as these will be mercilessly and undemocratically locked upat the first page.

And I'm not surprised if my post will be deleted as a part of this coverup.

I'm going to make a screenshot of this thread and save it so if they locked it or delete the thread this just PROVES it's a coverup.

[edit on 16-10-2008 by spacebagel]

This is a prime example of why people need to read through threads.

It stops you from looking like this guy.

I also wouldn't mind having the counter back though. I didn't depend on it, but it was nice to have.

[edit on 16-10-2008 by ben420]

Originally posted by spacebagel
And I'm not surprised if my post will be deleted as a part of this coverup.

I'm not sure I understand your point. What is the coverup you assume is going on?

page view or no page view, if someone is interested in a topic that you are writing about I am sure they will let you know about it. A lot of the time people will just flick through a thread and move on to the next one. This is not really a sign of it being a good thread just that it has been marketed well.

What does annoy me is that any thread which takes into account ATS actions is dumped into the board complaints megathread (or whatever). Many specific points get lost in this scenario. I mean if you were to continue with this thinking you could dump all of the NWO, UFO, 9/11 threads into a single thread to make modding easier etc. This does not work and actually makes the problem worse, rather than letting people air their concerns and deal with them in a more constructive way.

I think this is being seen more and more at the moment

[edit on 16-10-2008 by Cedik]

Originally posted by TruthTellist
How about a an icon beside the thread title that appears after 1000 views or something to that effect.

Perhaps a smiley face, or a thumbs-up emote would suffice.

Then we can all fell good that we got so many hits on our thread that we got a smiley face beside the title.

The problem isn't reading the number, it's keeping track of the number of views. Everytime someone just views a page it has to track that page view. If they could track the number of views to do what you mention, they would just show the number.

reply to post by badmedia


Yes, but what if they would no longer count page views after 1000?

Wouldn't that work?

EASILY remedied.

Ad a button on the post editor to add stat counter code provided by an outside approved service.

Don't be so concerned with page views, it has no bearing on whether a discussion is valid or not.

Post what you want, read the threads you want, and enjoy yourselves.

There is no conspiracy here to keep certain threads down by not showing page views (how would that work anyway).

If you really need self validation through page views that much, perhaps ATS isn't the place for you anyway.

I'd try to worry more about the content of the threads, rather than how popular they may be.

reply to post by SkepticOverlord


You should just get rid of all references to page views all over the site, i.e Profile page Recent Threads, so the 0 views isn't sitting there taunting the number minded.

What happened to the tagging mechanism? It's been gone since before the new site launch, is that over? Need we not concern ourselves with that anymore?

BTW, the new site design is fantastic.