A discussion about tracking profile page views on Discourse was initiated by OnceWas. The idea was to run statistics on user activity and its relation to profile views. lisajill and OnceWas expressed interest in displaying these statistics in the admin dashboard and making them visible to users.
Tgxworld then outlined the specifications for this feature, which include:
The discussion also touched on the idea of tracking when profile views took place, with OnceWas suggesting that it would be useful to see trends over time.
Gerhard raised concerns about privacy, suggesting that profile views should be an administrative feature only, and that users should not be able to see who viewed their profile. Lisajill and OnceWas countered that tracking profile views over time would be useful for understanding user engagement.
Tgxworld suggested that the feature should be admin/moderator-only, but codinghorror argued that view counts should be visible to everyone, just like topic view counts.
The discussion also touched on the idea of displaying profile views on the user card, with tgxworld suggesting that it would be a good idea to display the views count on the user card as a call to action. However, codinghorror argued that displaying view counts on the user card was not necessary.
The feature was eventually implemented by tgxworld, with the views count being displayed on the user’s profile page.
Later, purldator raised concerns about the potential for users to use profile views as a measure of importance or relevance, and suggested that it might be useful to have an option to remove pageviews from profiles. Tgxworld confirmed that the views count only includes visits from people who are not the profile owner.
Finally, erlend_sh suggested that it would be useful to track profile-popups, and codinghorror agreed. Tgxworld implemented this feature, tracking profile-popups in the same bucket as profile views.
I know Discourse tracks topic and post views and reads, but does it also track the number of views on user profiles? I would really like to run some statistics on how user activity relates to profile views.
I could always mine the nginx access logs, but that would require ongoing external saving of the numbers.
Storing this profile view data in one of the Discourse tables would be so nice and clean…
+1 
Would love to see this as a metric in admin too “total profile views”.
As long as individual profile view statistics are also accessible, very much yes to this too.
Since we’re also talking about displaying these stats, as a user, it would be great to know how many times my profile has been viewed. It would be a great tool to encourage users to make sure their profiles are populated.
Sure! Counting views to the profile page would be a nice stat cc: @tgxworld
I’ll have a look once I’m done with the Cakeday plugin 
Hey hey, you just made my day!
Here are the specs for this feature.
Let me know if I missed anything 
All of those specs are good.
Would there be any way to track when the profile views took place? The Discourse dashboard shows changes over time (Today, Yesterday, Last 7 Days, Last 30 Days, All) for the stats it currently tracks.
What about listing who viewed your page? That’s where it really gets interesting!
Do we really need to see this? I’m curious. What’s the use case? I just can’t think of one, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t one…
For privacy reasons I’m strongly against that. In my opinion nobody should see when and how often I visit a profile. Sites that show such things creep me out. It takes away from the experience if I have to think every time I visit a profile: “Did I visit this before?”, “Do I look at this too often?”, …
@tgxworld I’d really like to have a site setting to completely disable profile views. It shouldn’t even save those views to the database. And, in my opinion tracking of profile views should be off by default.
Just my 2 cents.
Our use case is using this to track engagement over time - which includes users interest in each other, hence wanting to see metrics here.
We’d also rather that profile views be visible only to moderators & admins. No specific need to know who looked, but user-user profile views over time are an interesting statistic for us.
There is definitely a value to tracking profile views over time. Are profile views up or down from the previous day, week or month? You wouldn’t be able to see any trends if you didn’t track the time as well. This is also consistent with the way other statistics are shown in the Dashboard.
Hmm it does seem like that this is an admin/moderator only feature since the use cases mentioned above is only concerned with performing some sort of trend analysis.
You would still show view counts to everyone on the profile, though, just like we do for topics…
“4. As a user, only I can see the number of profile page views for my profile.”
As per your comment, this should be removed from the specs? 
If topic view counts are visible I don’t see why profile view counts should be an international secret or anything…
Google+ also operates with public view counts on profiles:
On the other hand, most other social networks and forums do not.
For my own forum, I wouldn’t want profile page views as anything more than an administrative feature. Even if my own view count is visible to me alone, seeing it every time I open my profile is just going to be an unwelcome distraction.
I would love it.
Facebook becomes more and more boring the latest years, because they don’t showing anything like that. The newsfeed isn’t as much interesting like any of my discourse communities I’m in. Overall they recently kicked out the plugin support for www.sadlyunfriended.com – They informed me at least about cancelled friendships via email who and when. This was pretty great.
Back to Discourse: Viewing (by myself) who visited my profile page and (publicly visible) how many people, would be a killer feature 
Any thoughts on the position of the views count? Welcoming suggestions
Anyway, placing the views count on the user-card is intentional. If sort of acts like a call to action “O this guy has alot of profile views, let me find out why”.
Shouldn’t we be consistent and keep the same order for the Joined date/Last post/Views count?
I personally prefer the order shown in the profile page.
