Forums » Suggestions & Development Discussion » Forum post count

I'm not sure if this has been asked of yet, its definitely not something that HAS to be implemented in. Its super duper minor thing I'd like to see but not necessary.

I would be interested in seeing how many people have looked at my forum post. This could help me gauge interest in what the post is about. It in no way shows whose looking to avoid harassment, but for instance I'd like to know how many people have looked at my commission forum post or my post in the LFRP forums.

It could activate anxiety in some, though, if they see a lot of people are looking but no one (or very few) is responding.

I think this could easily be solved by having the ability to toggling it on and off. I see many other rp forums that have view counts


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Thinking more about what you said they can get anxiety from posting no matter what. Whether no one sends you replies or you get a lot when putting up an ad on the rp forum. If you know that no one looked at your forum post maybe they can use it as a tool to fix the topic title to attract more interest instead of thinking no one is actually interested in your rp idea if no one actually read it.

I've had nothing but negative experiences with view totals in other forums, personally. It's always led to people getting discouraged because "They got x views but nobody responded, that must mean I'm garbage". Or "Clearly people don't care about me because nobody is responding even though they saw the topic".

It's also rarely accurate, and I'm afraid that'll devalue the number being displayed and make it largely irrelevant. How would you track views? Is it page views? Is it for all views even from guests, or only for registered accounts? Do you count repeat views from one person? Can people use an auto refresh extension to rack up views and manipulate the number? If you limit it to one view per topic per account, how you gauge interest if you edit and repurpose existing topics?

I'm not sure how it would work. I have no idea about programming. However if the response is negativefrom everyone else then there you go. I personally was interested in it for my own growth. And like I said if you didn't have any views I would see it as a way to try and work on my topic titles to draw people in. Either way I guess it won't be implemented in most likely.

You could try looking at how those who get a lot of responses do it? Whether by checking public responses, or asking folks if they'll share how different tactics have worked out for them.

I want to clarify it wasn't a question of 'how can this get programmed', I'm mostly curious how you envision your views to be tracked, considering views can be distorted depending on how they're tracked. You mention you want to use this info to make decisions on how to move forward with things like commission topics and using more interesting titles, my question is how can this data be reliable? Bots crawl the web and forums, so every topic would be default have a bunch of views that aren't from humans, but it's hard to tell those apart. That also means no topic will be without views, if it gets indexed onto Google a bot visited the page and stored the info. Case in point, Google indexed Just Talkin' in July, so this topic would have gotten a 'view' even though it's not from a human. A topic with 10 pages where a person views of every page, would you want the count to increase by 10 for the views, or would you only want it counted once from a user account?

These are technical reasons why the view count would either be useful or useless to you, since you probably wouldn't want views to count from sources that can't actually interact with you on the site.

I'd also like to emphasize that this is just my personal opinion/inquiry, not a rejection or approval of the idea (that's up to Kim).

View counts can be a great idea in some places, but they may not be what the RPR is looking for. I agree with Zelphyr that observing the habits of high-view pages on other sites is a great idea!

If you're interested in your own growth, why not slap a poll front-and-center on your threads? The feedback you could get from a commission poll or an RP poll (as examples) could be much more helpful than a simple view count. Better yet, you could put the same polls across different sites and whichever got more replies would probably also be the one with more views.