Views counter specification

ux
#1

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

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

#6

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.

Yes.

No

No

4 Likes
#10

@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

#11

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

1 Like
#15

So if someone comes back to the topic multiple times in an 8-hour timeframe it only counts as one view?

#16

Yes, that’s correct – by default only 1 view is counted on a topic (per IP address) every 8 hours

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