# Het aantal kijkers weten
**URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/knowing-the-number-of-watchers/190941
**Category:** Feature
**Tags:** data-explorer, sql-query
**Created:** [19 mei 2021 om 16:37 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/knowing-the-number-of-watchers/190941 "2021-05-19T16:37:40Z")
**Posts on this page:** 10
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@tkearsley](https://meta.discourse.org/u/tkearsley)
#### Post date: [19 mei 2021 om 16:37 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/knowing-the-number-of-watchers/190941/1 "2021-05-19T16:37:40Z")
I think I bought this up way back when I first started testing the platform.
Will there ever be a way to know how many people are subscribing (watching) a particular topic?
I am being asked for this information more often these days.
---
### Author:  [@riking](https://meta.discourse.org/u/riking)
#### Post date: [19 mei 2021 om 17:50 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/knowing-the-number-of-watchers/190941/2 "2021-05-19T17:50:34Z")
This seems unlikely to ever be added as visible to non-administrators.
The freedom of individual users to choose how they want to consume the forum is important, and giving special consideration to Watching a topic by making the number visible to everyone is likely to create bad behavior patterns. (Number Go Up Syndrome is very powerful.)
You should be able to take a [Data Explorer](https://meta.discourse.org/t/32566?silent=true) query that gets this data and mark it as runnable by moderators or employees, if that’s who the requests are coming from.
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### Author:  [@tkearsley](https://meta.discourse.org/u/tkearsley)
#### Post date: [19 mei 2021 om 18:04 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/knowing-the-number-of-watchers/190941/3 "2021-05-19T18:04:44Z")
We would never want this for non-admins. I will try this with the DE.
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### Author:  [@tkearsley](https://meta.discourse.org/u/tkearsley)
#### Post date: [19 juli 2021 om 17:23 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/knowing-the-number-of-watchers/190941/4 "2021-07-19T17:23:08Z")
Was this ability ever added to Discourse reporting?
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### Author:  [@tkearsley](https://meta.discourse.org/u/tkearsley)
#### Post date: [22 juni 2022 om 20:38 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/knowing-the-number-of-watchers/190941/5 "2022-06-22T20:38:41Z")
Were there any updates to this?
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### Author:  [@MarkDoerr](https://meta.discourse.org/u/MarkDoerr)
#### Post date: [22 juni 2022 om 21:23 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/knowing-the-number-of-watchers/190941/7 "2022-06-22T21:23:15Z")
Hi Tom,
This has not been added as a default DE report. However I found a topic that provides a basic DE query to pull this information, maybe that will be helpful:
> [@Finding out how many users are watching or tracking?](https://meta.discourse.org/t/finding-out-how-many-users-are-watching-or-tracking/56900/2):
>
> There are “\_user” tables. category\_users, topic\_users, group\_users and tag\_users Each has a notification\_level field where the integer indicates a members preference - 0 Muted, 1 Normal, 2 Tracked, 3 Watched So a query something like this should work SELECT COUNT(id) FROM category\_users WHERE notification\_level = 3 GROUP BY category\_id to give you how many are Watching each category.
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### Author:  [@tkearsley](https://meta.discourse.org/u/tkearsley)
#### Post date: [22 juni 2022 om 21:59 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/knowing-the-number-of-watchers/190941/8 "2022-06-22T21:59:42Z")
Hi Mark,
Thanks. So from this it looks like I cannot perform this function at the topic level. Is this correct?
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### Author:  [@MarkDoerr](https://meta.discourse.org/u/MarkDoerr)
#### Post date: [22 juni 2022 om 22:34 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/knowing-the-number-of-watchers/190941/9 "2022-06-22T22:34:56Z")
Tom,
No, you can get that info at a topic level by swapping ‘topic’ for ‘category’ like this:
```plaintext
SELECT
COUNT(topic_id)
FROM
topic_users
WHERE
notification_level = 3
```
Again, this is a very basic query that just returns a total count of watchers from…in this case…all topics. If you want to specify a particular topic, you could add to the WHERE clause, e.g:
```plaintext
WHERE
notification_level = 3
AND topic_id = 29
```
---
### Author:  [@tkearsley](https://meta.discourse.org/u/tkearsley)
#### Post date: [22 juni 2022 om 22:46 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/knowing-the-number-of-watchers/190941/10 "2022-06-22T22:46:00Z")
This is great!
Thank you!
---
### Author:  [@NiceOldGuy](https://meta.discourse.org/u/NiceOldGuy)
#### Post date: [17 april 2024 om 17:27 UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/knowing-the-number-of-watchers/190941/11 "2024-04-17T17:27:29Z")
This is very useful, thanks @MarkDoerr. I modified the query to report on all four notification levels in one pass, and to take an array of `topic_id`s if needed.
The full grid output table isn’t pretty but has all the info I need.
edit: of course as soon as I posted, Discourse kindly showed me six links with other ways of solving this! Query on!
```plaintext
SELECT
topic_id,
notification_level,
COUNT(CASE WHEN notification_level = 0 THEN topic_id END) AS Muted_0,
COUNT(CASE WHEN notification_level = 1 THEN topic_id END) AS Normal_1,
COUNT(CASE WHEN notification_level = 2 THEN topic_id END) AS Tracking_2,
COUNT(CASE WHEN notification_level = 3 THEN topic_id END) AS Watching_3
FROM
topic_users
WHERE
topic_id IN (9831, 9572, 9424, 7567) -- Add your topic_ids here
GROUP BY
topic_id, notification_level
```