Views counter specification

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The discussion revolves around the functionality of the views counter in Discourse, particularly how it measures topic engagement. robbie.morrison raises questions about what constitutes a view, whether unregistered users’ views are counted, and if the counter stops when a topic is locked. awesomerobot clarifies that a view is a visit to a topic, with duplicate views from the same user (logged in or anonymous) counted only after an 8-hour interval, which can be adjusted via the topic view duration hours setting. Unregistered views are counted, and the counter remains active even when a topic is locked. robbie.morrison notes that this limits the use of views as a gauge of implicit support, suggesting alternatives like polls or likes. Falco recommends the Discourse Voting plugin for such purposes. Dawn seeks clarification on the 8-hour interval, which awesomerobot confirms. eecs_guy asks about the behavior when the duration is set to 0, but this remains unaddressed.

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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

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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

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How are views in a topic counted?
Is there any way I can get how many times the topic has been clicked?
How are pageviews/Views calculated?
Page Views vs. Top Views
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@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

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

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

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

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If topic view duration hours is set to 0, what will happen?

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