I’m using data explorer to count the number of views on a category using the topic_views table, but when I count the number of views for that category vs the number of views on the topic (topic.views) the number of views in the topic_views table is much less. Any idea why this is?
The topic_views table only records the first view of a topic for each user (or IP Address for anyone not logged in), whereas topics.views from the topics table records one new view every 8 hours (default, but configurable using the topic view duration hours admin setting).
We do have a new table to collect topic view data that can be reported on over a timeframe, which may also be of interest (quite new still, so the data won’t go back too far). That’s in the topic_view_stats table, and can give an aggregate amount of views per topic (for both anon and logged in users) per day.