Another curiosity - viewership counts on the board

[Josette]

While I’ve been asking some of my long-term curiosities, here’s another one.  I don't think I trust the viewership numbers.

The Acronyms Gone Wild on the Games Board has its last post from me almost 1 ½ years ago.  I could see that maybe some newcomers would look it up.  As it’s a long thread, perhaps some, bit by bit, go through the whole thing, so the viewer counts would increase a bit.

But, I can’t imagine there would be extensive views, especially every day.  For a long time I’ve been keeping track of the number of views, since it’s been such a puzzle.  Sometimes it just went up a few to 20 or 30 views a day, but it always went up at least a bit.  But it often also had jumps of 100 or more in a day!  That just seems totally inconceivable.  Lately it’s gone through a prolonged period of more than 100 a day.  Here are the counts from July - times are generally between midnight and 2 or 3 a.m.

July 1     35,341
July 2     35,404
July 3     35,562
July 4     35,726
July 5     35,834
July 6     35,972
July 7     36,102
July 8     36,241
July 9     36,340
July 10   36,437
July 11   36,579
July 12   36,636
July 13   36,762
July 14   36,792
July 15   36,896
July 16   37,019
July 17   37,145
July 18   37,329
July 19   37,437
July 20   37,586
July 21   37,695
July 22   37,869
July 23   38,016
July 24   38,131
July 25   38,244
July 26   38,358
July 27   38,462

[Mysterious Benefactor]

Well, there's no way a topic's views can increase unless someone opens it. And the system only adds 1 to the views for every one time someone opens a topic. But I'll admit those are some strange increases - especially when almost all the other topics on that board are much lower. However, "The Dark Shadows Alphabet Game" currently has 90630 - though it's been around since 12/06...

[Josette]

I thought perhaps you had a way of checking "behind the scenes" and finding out something.  I was keeping track of it almost since it stopped being active.  As I said, sometimes it only went up by 10 or 20, but even that every day seemed surprising.  And then there would be these jumps of 100 or more.  And, like recently, there are spells when that happens regularly.  It's really been puzzling me.

[Gerard]

Most views are between midnight and 3:00 a.m.?  My god, we are fanatics, aren't we?

Gerard

[Mysterious Benefactor]

I think Josette meant she checked between midnight and 3am.   But I suspect you know that and was simply making a joke.

Actually though, it would be interesting to know what times of the day are the most popular on the forum. Individual member's profile stats show what times of the day they're most active - but I don't think there's a feature that shows overall peak activity.

As for the topic viewership numbers, I've said this before, but my main problem with how viewership is counted is that it's only counted when someone actually opens a specific topic to read it. If someone uses the "Show unread posts since last visit" or "Show new replies to your posts" or "View the most recent posts on the forum" features, the topics read using those features don't receive any increase to their viewership numbers. And a lot of members and guests like to use one or more of those features. So, if anything, the viewership numbers for topics on the whole are actually lower than they should be...

And as for being able to check all the activity on the forum in a given day, that's something that we were quite capable of doing with a few of our previous hosts. But when we joined our current host, that was a feature for which we would have had to pay extra. And considering that in all the years the forum has been around we might have checked such activity maybe three or four times, we didn't feel the need to pay extra for something that in all likelihood we would never use. Though it's my understanding that the activity info for all their Web sites, whether their owners pay to see it or not, is actually compiled by our host every day just in case our host needs to check anything...

[Gerard]

I think Josette meant she checked between midnight and 3am.   But I suspect you know that and was simply making a joke.

Don't be so sure, MB.  My, isn't you neck looking so...never mind.

Gerard

[Josette]

Apparently viewership counts were lost in the backup, too.  The last number I had was 39726 and now it's 39403.

[Mysterious Benefactor]

The counts on the forum that were lost in those 18 days might be mostly recoverable. Our host didn't lose those tables in the database. But it's just that I haven't gotten around to checking that out yet... 

[Josette]

Having finally posted about these counts, I wasn't going to continue it, but after today's I have to.  About a month and 1/2 or 2 months ago it went through a "slow" period, where it just went up a bit each day, perhaps 3 or 4 or maybe up to 15-20, for a week or two.  But, it did keep increasing each day.  Then, it went back to the hundred or at least close to 100 each day.  But today it jumped from 43,260 yesterday to 43,627!!  That just seems totally impossible!!!!!

[dom]

Impossible, yet, the numbers speak for themselves. Maybe MB can make the numbers invisible so they don't keep you up at night, . I'm guessing that they follow a normal pattern of light and heavy internet traffic.

[Josette]

Hi Dom - The point is that there were only a few people participating in the game, and even if a lot of others were watching it, it's been a year and 8 months plus since the last post!!  I'm amazed that it goes up every day at all, let alone by 100 or so.  So, this huge jump is more than mind-boggling!!  By the way, it's up another 160 since yesterday.

[Josette]

I wasn't going to come back to this, but from yesterday to today it went from 71,218 to 72,543, a jump of more than a thousand!!!!!!

[Mysterious Benefactor]

That might not be as odd as it could appear. Strangely enough, ever since the forum came back from the disaster created when our host moved us to a new server, there have been an increasing amount of new people reading the forum. (I'm not sure why so many new people are suddenly discovering us, but we're not about to complain.  )  And on any given day lately there are times when there are over 100 readers of the forum at the same time. So, if only say, 8 of those readers happened upon the topic and they decided to read the whole thing through in one day, which would be an easy enough thing to do given that the vast majority of posts are so short, that would generate 1056 new page views. And while it might not seem likely that 8 or more people would do that on any given day, it's not impossible. So who knows...

[Josette]

Does each individual page of a topic count as a page view?  I assumed each topic counted as one long page.

[Mysterious Benefactor]

I was going by the Stats Page, which counts Page views as views of individual pages of each topic. But you could be right that the views listed on the Message Index page for each board increases the views by only one no matter how many pages one reads at one time before moving on to another topic. In that case, who knows why the system may differentiate between the two?