story reader counts

[Magnetron]

I have to ask this here instead of the PF&D for reasons that will be obvious.

Stories here can be multi paged. Let's use an example of me reading a 3 page story.

Am I counted as 1 reader?

Or am I counted as 3 readers because I loaded 3 pages onto my reading device?

If I read it twice in one day, am I counted as 2 or 6 readers?

Is my IP address somehow a signal factor in determining that I've already read the story and thus shouldn't be counted any further than as 1 unique reader?

Or does that refresh every 24 hours so that I can be counted as a new reader should I happen to revisit the same story the very next day to finish it and thus can be counted as 2 readers even though I only actually read the story once?

So many question us poets have, seeing as how our work rarely exceeds one page.

 

[oggbashan]

The view counter is not an accurate indicator of how many people have looked at your story.

It is only of value when comparing a story against another. If one of your stories has 10,000 views and another has 50,000 views - it is probably an indication of the popularity of the category. Incest will get many more views than Reviews and Essays.

Or it is an indication of the attractiveness of the title. A 'view' could mean no more than an individual (or bot!) looked at the first page for a couple of seconds.

 

[elfin_odalisque]

As always, Ogg is omniscient.

Views are not Reads. Every time someone opens your story you should register a 'view'. It starts before posting to the site when the story is 'pending'

 

[TxRad]

As always, Ogg is omniscient.

Views are not Reads. Every time someone opens your story you should register a 'view'. It starts before posting to the site when the story is 'pending'

The views while pending issue has been cleared up as best I can tell.

 

[RejectReality]

It's not purely "hits" because Laurel said long, long ago that they're filtered.

What is being filtered is the question, though. The most common thing would be known spiders from search engines, social media sites, etc. I would imagine there's also something in place to prevent a simple refresh from upping the view counter.

My guess is for a single pager, that's all that's being removed from the final count.

For multi-pagers, I think the session is probably being tracked and visits to the remaining pages of the story don't count as an additional view.

Odds are that your IP isn't involved at all.

That's all speculation based on things Laurel has said over the years and a little experimentation, though. I would wager that even Laurel doesn't know exactly what will register as a view. Only the person who coded those lines of PHP is likely to have any real idea.

 

[Magnetron]

I just ask out of curiosity.

I know that forum threads usually accumulate views based on pages clicked upon by both bots and humans cycling from beginning to end. So reading a 20 page forum thread would rack up 20 views; possibly more if the reader jumped back and forth between pages to reread something in particular or look at a cat gif.

I wondered if the same applied to the stories.