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Mystified by view counts and story positions

SimonDoom

SimonDoom

Kink Lord
Joined
Apr 9, 2015
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I am completely mystified by something. I have an ongoing story series. The first three chapters are on the 12 month toplist. The fifth has just appeared on the toplist, but the fourth never did, despite the fact that on my control panel My Stories list chapter four has MORE views than chapter five.

How is this possible?

Are views counted and handled completely differently on different lists? That appears to me to be the case, because the view count on the toplists never matches, and often is quite different from, the view count that shows up on the My Stories list. I'm confused how this works. Anyone know?
 
The number on your private control panel is the most up to date and accurate.

Every other place your statistics appear is behind by varying degrees. Most are updated only once every 24 hours. Some areas of the category hubs update more frequently.

Which toplist are you talking about? Only one is based on views. Every other toplist is based upon score and vote totals.
 
SimonDoom said:
I am completely mystified by something. I have an ongoing story series. The first three chapters are on the 12 month toplist. The fifth has just appeared on the toplist, but the fourth never did, despite the fact that on my control panel My Stories list chapter four has MORE views than chapter five.

How is this possible?

Are views counted and handled completely differently on different lists? That appears to me to be the case, because the view count on the toplists never matches, and often is quite different from, the view count that shows up on the My Stories list. I'm confused how this works. Anyone know?
Click to expand...
Unless something has changed drastically, the only thing that controls position on the top list is vote-average and a minimum ten votes.

Views have no effect at all.
 
Okay, I did some of my own research and deduced that you're talking about your Mom is a hot Mom series, and you're talking about the 12 month views toplist.

What you're seeing is certainly an anomaly, and not one I'm familiar with. There's a known glitch that happens at page transitions on the toplists, causing listings that should be there to fall into a wormhole of the pagination. Eventually, your stats change enough to get you out of the wormhole and onto the page, and some other unlucky soul takes your place.

But with the view counts of chapter 4, it shouldn't be anywhere near the page transition. It should be in the middle of page 5.

It also isn't the same issue that caused the score-based toplists to freeze up some time ago, because when that happened, whatever page had frozen wouldn't update at all, and you had Chapter 5 appear on the same page Chapter 4 should have appeared on.

We've got a new bug crawling through the toplists, it seems.

I have an Incest story about to hit. If it gets enough views, I might be able to do some real-time tracking and get a better read on what's going on. It's a toss-up whether it will, though. It's brother/sister, so it isn't likely to garner the kind of response you get from a mom/son story.
 
Weird Harold said:
Unless something has changed drastically, the only thing that controls position on the top list is vote-average and a minimum ten votes.

Views have no effect at all.
Click to expand...

I'm referring to the 12 month toplist of all literotica stories based on views.

I've never understood how views are tabulated for this toplist. If the control panel list is the most up to date, then why does the story show more views on the toplist than on the control panel list?
 
With all due respect to Manu & Co, I wonder what ‘views’ really means. I have stories with 50 views and stories with 500 views. What’s the difference? Not the category. Not the average star rating. However … if a story with a rating of 4.30 and 500 views gets a five star, it makes bugger all difference. If a story with a rating of 4.30 and 50 views get a five star, it pushes it up slightly. My friend, ‘The Wise One’, tells me not to worry about either. ‘’Set your children free,’ she says. Yeah … well … not a lot else that I can do, is there? :)
 
RejectReality said:
Okay, I did some of my own research and deduced that you're talking about your Mom is a hot Mom series, and you're talking about the 12 month views toplist.

What you're seeing is certainly an anomaly, and not one I'm familiar with. There's a known glitch that happens at page transitions on the toplists, causing listings that should be there to fall into a wormhole of the pagination. Eventually, your stats change enough to get you out of the wormhole and onto the page, and some other unlucky soul takes your place.

But with the view counts of chapter 4, it shouldn't be anywhere near the page transition. It should be in the middle of page 5.

It also isn't the same issue that caused the score-based toplists to freeze up some time ago, because when that happened, whatever page had frozen wouldn't update at all, and you had Chapter 5 appear on the same page Chapter 4 should have appeared on.

We've got a new bug crawling through the toplists, it seems.

I have an Incest story about to hit. If it gets enough views, I might be able to do some real-time tracking and get a better read on what's going on. It's a toss-up whether it will, though. It's brother/sister, so it isn't likely to garner the kind of response you get from a mom/son story.
Click to expand...

Thanks for this reply. I appreciate the effort and analysis. What I've never understood is that the view counts on the toplist typically are HIGHER than on my control panel list, which supposedly is more up to date. Baffling.
 
That could be a clue. Perhaps the toplists are using different bot filters than the control panel.

I'm assuming that you're using the new control panel here. The toplists are still operating on old code, and could be using outdated filters.

I've been speculating for a while that the drop in views some people are experiencing is due to updated bot filters removing more known spiders and crawlers than in the past. The toplist numbers being higher than your control panel numbers could be evidence of that.

Filtering the same raw data twice doesn't make sense, but we're talking about a website that is still running legacy code on top of a new infrastructure until all the new pages are rolled out.

I need to check the new control panel, but in the old one, the views number was the only one that wasn't essentially real time. It updated every 15 minutes.

Again, my upcoming story will be useful for that, because incest stories acquire views so rapidly in the beginning that it will be obvious whether it's coming in real time or in hops.

SimonDoom said:
I'm referring to the 12 month toplist of all literotica stories based on views.

I've never understood how views are tabulated for this toplist. If the control panel list is the most up to date, then why does the story show more views on the toplist than on the control panel list?
Click to expand...
 
Last edited:
I did a closer inspection of the numbers to get a better idea what's going on. Here's what I found.

First, I use the new control panel My Stories list. As far as I can tell, the view counts on this list are updated approximately every 10 minutes.

The 12 month Most Read stories toplist is updated once every day, not always at exactly the same time but early in the morning where I am. I happened to wake up early this morning and checked and it had updated by 3:20 am my time.

So you would think that these two lists would most nearly match each other at this time of day. But what I found is that there's a significant disparity between the numbers, and in most cases the toplist view total is HIGHER than the view total in the control panel. Specifically:


Mom 1 Toplist is 1098 views higher
Mom 2 Toplist is 3,992 views LOWER
Mom 3 Toplist is 806 views higher
Mom 4 Story is not on the toplist at all despite having almost 2,000 views more than
Mom 5 according to the control panel
Mom 5 Toplist is 682 views higher

Those are weird results.
 
Last edited:
Those numbers at least demonstrate why Ch. 04 may not be showing up on the list. If the toplist is identifying it as being around 4k views lower than it shows in your control panel, as it does for Ch. 02, then it would fall off the bottom of the list.

If you happen to have time, check the toplist again tomorrow morning. See if the numbers reported by the toplist have changed. Ch. 02 in particular. If the reported number for that one doesn't increase and the number in your control panel does, that's a data point that could be helpful.
 
This is weird.

Chapter 4 of the Hot Mom series just showed upon on the 12 month most read toplist, a week after Chapter 5 appeared on the list. But on my control panel, Chapter 4 has over 1,800 more views than Chapter 5. I have no idea how this could happen.
 
Well, that confirms my theory that the reason it hadn't appeared yet was because the numbers the toplist was using to determine its position pushed it off the bottom of the list. It's ticked up just high enough now to squeak in there in last place, or another story reached the year + 1 day mark and opened a spot for it.

As to why the toplist is using numbers that don't correlate with the most up-to-date numbers in your control panel, that's still a mystery.

I'm not seeing any anomalies with mine, but it's not high enough to hit the bottom of the 12 month list. ( and not likely to do so now that it's a few days out ) In the case of other problems in the past, oddities didn't necessarily cross over between the various time-range tabs of the toplists, so the 30 day list may be working just fine.

The only thing I can think of is that this list has the same odd, still unexplained quirk that the score toplists do. When a story has votes swept, its listing gets sort of "frozen" where it was until it picks up enough votes to pass the number it had before the sweep.

If the number of reported views for #4 don't change when the list updates tomorrow ( assuming it doesn't get edged out again ) then that's confirmation that its numbers are frozen.

Do you happen to know if there have been sweeps which have removed votes from those stories recently? Or large ones in the past from which it hasn't yet recouped the losses with new votes?
 
RejectReality said:
Well, that confirms my theory that the reason it hadn't appeared yet was because the numbers the toplist was using to determine its position pushed it off the bottom of the list. It's ticked up just high enough now to squeak in there in last place, or another story reached the year + 1 day mark and opened a spot for it.

As to why the toplist is using numbers that don't correlate with the most up-to-date numbers in your control panel, that's still a mystery.

I'm not seeing any anomalies with mine, but it's not high enough to hit the bottom of the 12 month list. ( and not likely to do so now that it's a few days out ) In the case of other problems in the past, oddities didn't necessarily cross over between the various time-range tabs of the toplists, so the 30 day list may be working just fine.

The only thing I can think of is that this list has the same odd, still unexplained quirk that the score toplists do. When a story has votes swept, its listing gets sort of "frozen" where it was until it picks up enough votes to pass the number it had before the sweep.

If the number of reported views for #4 don't change when the list updates tomorrow ( assuming it doesn't get edged out again ) then that's confirmation that its numbers are frozen.

Do you happen to know if there have been sweeps which have removed votes from those stories recently? Or large ones in the past from which it hasn't yet recouped the losses with new votes?
Click to expand...

The story finally, and briefly, showed up as number 250 on the 12 month toplist, with 116,100 views, while on the control panel it was listed with 118,796 views. So on the control panel it had 2696 more views.

Meanwhile, the stats for chapter 5 are the opposite: it has 781 FEWER views on the control panel than on the toplist. Very weird.

I follow my stories fairly regularly and am not aware of any sweeps that would account for such a big difference. And would sweeps delete views, or just votes?

Since yesterday the story has dropped off the toplist again, presumably because it was bumped by a story with more daily traffic.
 
No, sweeps only delete votes, but that oddity with the score toplists could still potentially be in the views toplist.

If you haven't experienced any sweeps that dropped your vote totals below their max, then it's not the same glitch. Could be something similar, but it's not the exact same one.

Did the views total displayed for Ch. 05 change when the list updated today, compared to what it showed for yesterday?
 
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