What's happened with our page views?

reply to post by JohnnyAnonymous


I disagree with you. The reasons why I want post views is so I can see how many people viewed my topic, and, it gives me instant feedback. I do not view ATS as a talent show of the sort.

reply to post by JohnnyAnonymous


Aww shucks, you beat me to it.

I couldn't have said it better myself, so I won't try.

I'll just agree with you wholeheartedly.

Originally posted by JohnnyAnonymous

(Johnny takes off his mod gloves)

What am I really posting at ATS for, the fame and the glory, or the possible education and the need to have certain queries answered?

(Johnny slips back on his Mod gloves)

And I thought that Hank Paulson was the top bullsheteer in the Northern Hemisphere.

Or am I wrong? Was it really so that the idea behind creating ATS was to give some folks the opportunity "to have certain queries answered?"

(I'm just pushing buttons. Unfortunately I can't tell you now how many, but I am.)


[edit on 10/17/2008 by stander]

reply to post by stander


I don't believe that's the only reason why ATS was created. I believe ATS was created to investigate conspiracy theories and to question governments around the globe and to follow their agendas. I don't think it had to do with answering some people's queries... I just think it was originally meant as a site to spread information.

Correct me if I'm wrong though but that's what I believe.

Yes there is something deffinately going on here! Hope this issue gets sorted out soon! < ! >

reply to post by JohnnyAnonymous


I still think with the amount of annon posters it was/is a nice feature to have.

it does give an indication of how well a thread is being recieved , regardless if no one posts.

i do not need my ego stroked ( although i am suprised Dave posted against this , he likes ANYTHING to be stroked :p )

people dont like Features being taken away .. i like the view count / other s dont but i can certinly live without it.

THE FINAL WORD



I think many people are reading only a few responses in this thread, if any, and assuming there is some type of conspiracy to keep thread-views out of public display. No such thing is going on. Here is the final word on the matter...


MASSIVE TRAFFIC
We are the Internet's 2,382nd most-popular website. We deliver upwards of 800,000 views of thread-pages every day. At peak traffic periods (4PM to 1AM EST) we deliver about twenty threads EVERY SECOND. Our cluster of web-servers is dedicated to only creating and delivering the page HTML, and even though our three servers deliver no images, we send out over 4 terabytes of text to visitors every month.

LIMITED HARDWARE
While our database server is the biggest, most-expensive, most-powerful, and fastest we can obtain from a leased-system provider, it still has performance limits. While it is possible to expand beyond a single database server into a cluster, it requires some rather expensive expertise to assemble, as well as unique hardware that ain't cheap as well.

NO OTHER SITE OUR SIZE TRACKS VIEWS
The above traffic and hardware issues are the reason we removed view-tracking, and is the reason nearly all sites at our level of traffic do the same. SlashDot has not tracked topic views for years (and we get more traffic than they do), Digg.com does not track topic views, Yahoo Message Boards doesn't track views, Reddit doesn't track topic views (and depending on our peaks, we sometimes have more traffic than they do), and just about all other sites with user-generated comments and replies with very-high traffic don't log real-time views.

THE REASON VIEWS AREN'T DYNAMICALLY TRACKED
With all of the above in mind, as I and others have indicated, dynamically tracking views in real-time requires a write to the database each time a thread is viewed. Writes are the most intensive database operations (even a simple update), and at a pace of delivering 20 threads-a-second, it becomes a significant strain on whatever database infrastructure is used (even the massive cluster used by SlashDot).

We're looking at alternative ways to dynamically track key stats such as podcast plays... but given our size and traffic, tracking thread views in real-time will no longer be part of ATS. It's simply not viable.

While we are on the topic, I want to bring another issue to the Mods attention.

When I click the Back button in the browser to go back to the previous page, nothing happens. I looked at the history in the back button (clicked the down arrow by the navigation buttons in IE) and I noticed a huge list of ads! It's actually loading ads on for every minute or so. Now I have to click the back button multiple times to go back to the previous page. This sucks! These ads are supposed to load asynchronously behind the scenes without using up the page's history. What gives?

Here's what it looks like -

i36.tinypic.com...

FYI, this started happening a few weeks ago.

reply to post by SkepticOverlord


Thanks for the explanation.
I understand the load and latency of writing to the database.

But why write to the DB?
Wouldn't it be possible to generate a totally independent counting mechanism at the page level and incorporate this into page 1 of every thread?

Seems there has to be a workaround even if we have take do additional clicks to get that info.
Keeping a tally of the topics of interest is important.