[CuLT / Admin] Post views over time?

Time Magazine

Hai,

This could probably go in Development too, but it's more something I wondering if you have already rather than a request.

A post I made at 2am tonight had two thanks within ten minutes. Obviously it had therefore been read at least twice in those ten minutes. That got me thinking that maybe most "views" of your post come from its appearance on the front page.

But then maybe not. If a thread goes from a boring "only 3 replies" to "an epic thread of almighty proportions", then it's possible that the first few posts get viewed consistently and so the proportion of views emerging from the post's appearance on the first page is quite small.

Maybe this is something John knows about due to his interest in social networks. Is there knowledge on these dynamic effects of views of individual posts? If not, would it be possible/interesting to track it? Maybe you could take a random sample of 100 posts yet to be made and keep a specific log of whenever the page it is on is viewed? It'd be nice to see a graph with time on the x-axis and "total times read" on the y-axis, no?

Maybe I'm just very boring

CuLT

Something that has come up in conversation alright, but a pretty significant alteration to the DB, as well as general overheads, and with our current problems it's been put on the backburner before being considered again.

Time Magazine

Cool.

Oh and in case you're unaware, apparently it's an automatic option in vB. Concerns regarding capacity and overheads would obviously still apply, but that might overcome the DB stuff.

Ta.

CuLT

I'm *pretty* sure that option doesn't exist, I imagine I'd have come across it, or some reference to it in the database or the vbulletin support forums or manual by now if it was.

Could be wrong though, or I may be misinterpreting what you're asking about, so if you have a link it'd be handy.

Time Magazine

That's alright, I appreciate you're new to this internet thing :pac:

I got a PM from someone today stating "vbulletin has a standard function for mods where they can see exactly who views the post and when", I'll see if they have a link etc.

Time Magazine

My friend says this lists the details on thread-views (who has visited and the time).

CuLT

The Economist wrote: »

My friend says this lists the details on thread-views (who has visited and the time).

So yeah, as I mentioned, not a default part of vBulletin. Also it's not much use for actually tracking information historically, unfortunately, for reasons that are clear if one reads the description/looks at the code, etc.

Moved to Development, but my first post on this still stands. Thanks

javaboy

This could be an interesting idea for the Data Competition (subforum of Development) if it's still running. You could do build some snazzy model of how a thread grows and gets views and what not. But if the data is not collected in the first place then it's not really possible.

One thing you could do is stick an image in your posts/sig that links to a script in the same way hit counters do. Along the lines of the you.php doohickey. Of course you'd need Boards to host it to get at the username info. Probably a lot more hassle than it's worth really.