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.
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
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.
@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