Can someone explain why Discourse built-in anonymous pageviews are 30x larger than Matomo pageviews for any given day?
Matomo shows unique times and Discourse real and happened views. Basically if you hit several times F5 Matomo counts one and Discourse counts how many times you hit F5.
Matomo shows pageviews and unique pageviews, on my site there is a slight difference between Matomo pageviews and unique pageviews. Discourse pageviews are 30x larger.
I could be wrong, but Google or Matomo, for example, are usually blocked by ad blockers (such as uBlock Origin or similar). Because of that, I would expect some difference, at the very least.
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Discourse is a single-page application, so any request that reaches the server and incurs significant work will be counted as a page view. All requests for content, such as a list of categories, topics, or posts, count as page views, whether by a human or a web crawler.
Other tools generally use Javascript to count page views on the full page load, and omit web crawlers by default. Our counting is performed on the raw requests made and we work hard to only issue page views on the first load of a page or when you transition routes, such as moving from topics to the latest list.
This difference in what/how we track views typically results in Discourse showing 2-4x page views than other tools (including GA), even when omitting the crawler views from the Discourse report.
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I use the Brave browser which blocks ads and Matomo accurately tracks visits using it.
Discourse tracks Logged in users, Anonymous users and Crawlers, so I don’t see how crawlers are contributing to 30x inflated Anonymous users pageviews compared to Matomo.
Now compare topic views count to pageviews count, if those pageviews were accurate the topic views count would be much higher.
I have never seen anything like 30x higher – it’s usually 2-3% higher. I can’t tell you specifically what is going on here.