Views counter specification

[robbie.morrison]

The Open Energy Modelling Initiative currently has a draft questionnaire response open for community comment:

• Ithaka questionnaire on community data useage - Open data - Open Energy Modelling Initiative

In this context, the views counter for the topic can be used to estimate the level of implicit support. But is not clear to me how this counter indeed works. Hence:

• what constitutes a “view” and are the underlying thresholds configurable? *
• do unregistered “views” count?
• when the topic is closed (that is locked), is the “views” counter also disabled?

  * = I guess one has to scroll to the end of the topic at least?

I searched this forum for information but nothing relevant appeared. Moreover is more formal documentation available somewhere that could instead satisfy these kinds of queries? TIA. R

[awesomerobot (Kris)]

@robbie.morrison

what constitutes a “view” and are the underlying thresholds configurable? *

A visit to a topic. Duplicate visits from the same user are counted after a 8 hour interval. A user is either a logged in user or an IP address for anonymous visitors. The 8 hour interval can be changed with the site setting topic view duration hours.

@robbie.morrison

do unregistered “views” count?

Yes.

@robbie.morrison

when the topic is closed (that is locked), is the “views” counter also disabled?

No

@robbie.morrison

• = I guess one has to scroll to the end of the topic at least?

No

[robbie.morrison]

@Kris very useful information, thanks. It means, though, that using views as a gauge of implicit support is more limited than I imaged. Although I guess I could seek explicit support by running a poll or even just asking for likes. Thanks again for your reply. R

[Falco (Rafael dos Santos Silva)]

There is the Discourse Voting plugin that was created for this exact use case of gauging support for proposals.