I manage a couple of communities, they are both the same size (both member count and active members) and both run on Discourse.
In one of those communities we get ~100 User Profile Views per week and in the other we get ~17.5k per week.
That number is almost inconceivably different, so I’m curious to know whether anyone else is experiencing something similar.
For context, these communities both sit around the 1500 member mark.
Edit: This seems to be a relatively recent phenomenon. I’m suspicious.
That is indeed mighty strange. Do you have that site hooked up with Google Analytics or something similar so you could cross-examine this data? Maybe it’s just some search engine crawler gone bonkers.
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Yeah, I do have GA hooked up but I’m not smart enough with it to cross examine. Help?
What I can see is that for the same time period covered by the graph above, there were only ~100 views across the two highest ranking profiles (assuming I’m querying the right URLs). It doesn’t add up.
we have a community of 900 users resulted in 80 profile view per week. profile view is not allowed to anonymous users in our forum. maybe this option has been set differently in those forums.
This is the most likely reason as to why it isn’t exhibiting that behavior, as IIRC most of the discussion on this topic has been a “notice a spike in profile views after recent upgrade”, but I may be simplifying that some.
I took a look at the code and it was last changed in February so I am skeptical that it is code related. Most of it looks pretty straightforward, so I don’t see why this would happen.
It does use the ip address of the user when anonymous to prevent knocking the count up too high, so it’s possible that the IP is not being passed in correctly anymore due to a change in proxies or something. However, I suspect we’d see that on all Discourse sites we host, not just some of them.
I am on 1.5 stable, and I notice there are occasional days when the number of profile views are 5-10x higher than the usual level. But not constant increase like yours - single days, few times a month.
AFAIK there are 2 Settings that might be involved.
hide user profiles from public [default not checked]
Disable user cards, user profiles and user directory for anonymous users.
user profile view duration hours [default 8]
Count a new user profile view once per IP/User every N hours
The first could be tried if you’re willing to experiment at risk of upsetting non-logged-in visitors. But if it drops that would suggest that a lot of views are coming from anons.
The second might be if you had tweaked the setting lower, or maybe there’s a bug somewhere interfering with the timing.
Yeah, I did that several weeks ago. No change.[quote=“Mittineague, post:19, topic:46833”]
The second might be if you had tweaked the setting lower, or maybe there’s a bug somewhere interfering with the timing.
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