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Showing a read count on an article, good or bad?

HMTKSteveHMTKSteve
edited November 2006 in Everything Else
Just our of curiosity, How do the forum folks feel about sites that publicly display the amount of times their content has been accessed?

I'm torn on the issue.

If I see a site with large numbers I tend to think they are bragging but, If I see a site with low numbers I tend to move as they must not get much traffic.

I have such things turned off on my site. It makes it harder for me to track what articles people are reading but it also avoids the whole "refresh to check my page hits" thing.

Comments

  • AprecheApreche
    I think it's kind of silly. If you are going to track your web traffic, you should do that somewhere your visitors can't see. Also, constantly checking traffic is useless and a waste of time. If you look at your stats more than once a day, it's overkill. The only people who might want to check more often than that are people who are trying to scam and make money from adsense or something. You can guess what I think of those people.

    Look at the websites of the world. You don't see "real" websites putting up hit counters. Google, Yahoo!, Amazon, Engadget, nobody does that kind of stuff. It is entirely in the MySpace/Geocities realm of websites. If you don't mind being a crummy personal home page with hit counters, animated skulls and a tiled background, then go for it. If you want to be professional, do like the professionals do.
  • MamathMamath
    edited November 2006
    When I see those things they are usually done very tackily. I suppose that in certain situations they might be a good addition but the majority of the time...no.

    I don't really understand how it is that you can't check the hits on parts of your own site without a public counter though?
    Post edited by Apreche on
  • AprecheApreche
    I don't really understand how it is that you can't check the hits on parts of your own site without a public counter though?
    Web servers have this thing called an access log. The way HTTP works is pretty simple. First, you establish a TCP/IP connection to the web server, usually on port 80. Then you typically say one of two things: GET X or POST X. The web server then responds to your request. It's that simple.

    In the process of doing this GET or POST, the web server gets lots of information. Some of the information is given by the web browser, some is on the TCP/IP layer and some the server asks for. The server takes this information and writes it down. Here is an example line from an Apache access log.

    www.frontrowcrew.com 5.5.5.5 - - [13/Nov/2006:10:57:45 -0500]
    "GET/forum/images/avatars/icon_65.jpg HTTP/1.1" 200 1179
    "http://www.frontrowcrew.com/forum/comments.php?DiscussionID=1140&page;=1"
    "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1) Gecko/20061010 Firefox/2.0" VLOG=-

    This would actually all be one line in the access log, but I broke it up to make it easier to read. The first line contains the vhost, the ip address of the requester and the date and time of the request. Normally the vhost is not listed in the access log, but I customized the format of the access log in the apache configure to make it show up there. You can customize the log in any way you want.

    The second line has the GET request. Someone requested a forum avatar jpg via HTTP 1.1. Notice the 200. That's the code for success. If they requested something that was not there, it would be 404! If it was something forbidden, it would be 403. OMG, you learned something about HTTP!

    The third line is the referral page. They requested that jpg as part of forum discussion 1140 page 1. The last line is the User Agent. This is where the browser tells the server what browser, operating system and rendering engine it is running. This person visited the forum with Firefox 2 on Windows XP. If you want, you can make your web page pay attention to this information.

    Anyway. If you want to track stats you just keep the access logs around. Do you read them directly? Heck no. You get a program like analog or awstats or some other program to read the logs and generate a document full of statistics for you to read.

    The other way to get stats is to use something like Google Analytics. What you do there is you put a Javascript on your web page. It doesn't change the way your page looks, but when people visit your page, they will end up talking to Google while the page loads. Google asks them for information, and hopefully gets it. Google takes that information and uses it to generate statistics about your visitors. You go to the Google Analytics web site and login to read it.

    Those are the two major ways of getting web stats. It should be obvious why they are all flawed, and there are no better ways.
  • tuttle88tuttle88
    I have a hit counter on my blog, because I like it, and it looks like a dragon.
  • MamathMamath
    edited November 2006
    Blogs are mostly personal things and I would expect and accept any resulting tackiness. :p

    Thanks, Apreche! Sweet sweet knowledge...
    Post edited by Mamath on
  • tuttle88tuttle88
    edited November 2006
    Blogs are mostly personal things and I would expect and accept any resulting tackiness. :p

    Thanks, Apreche! Sweet sweet knowledge...
    I have worked quite hard to remove most tackiness from my blog. My MySpace page, on the other hand..., it's my dream to make it the worst on the Internet.
    Post edited by Apreche on
  • MamathMamath
    I have worked quite hard to remove most tackiness from my blog. My MySpacepage,on the other hand..., it'smy dream to make it the worst on theInternet.
    Good luck with that... You've got some stiff competition.
  • Johannes Uglyfred IIJohannes Uglyfred II
    I have worked quite hard to remove most tackiness from my blog. My MySpacepage,on the other hand..., it'smy dream to make it the worst on theInternet.
    Good luck with that... You've got some stiff competition.
    And from people who aren't even trying for tackiness, at that!
  • tuttle88tuttle88
    I got pwnd by Mr Period. :(
  • MamathMamath
    And from people who aren't even trying for tackiness, at that!
    I think the not trying is what gives them their super powers. Idiot Savants, if you will.
  • tuttle88tuttle88
    And from people who aren't even trying for tackiness, at that!
    I think the not trying is what gives them their super powers.Idiot Savants, if you will.
    I guess I'll never really be able to compete with those that are naturals at tacky. I do have Paris Hilton on auto play though.
  • EsonLinjiEsonLinji
    Dear God, you are Satan incarnate, Tuttle88
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