Suggestion: A way to see how many people follow your thread.

It's very well known that QQ suffers from a very large percetage of lurkers. The reason for this is obvious, not everyone wants to interact in a location they go to for porn. However, this does mean that if you get 5 votes, that is not remotely representative of the amount of people actually reading your quest.

For authors, or at least most people I've talked to, they write for both their own enjoyment and so people can enjoy reading it. Without people reading it, there's a lot of extra reason for someone to give in to plotbunnies and just try something else, just so they'll pick up readers again, or perhaps even stop writing altogether. This then leads to an extra amount of incomplete stories.

Currently, there is no way at all to know how many people are reading. Now, I'm not saying we should take away the privacy of the lurkers. Their identities should be as safe as they have been so far, but perhaps having a 'total' number of the amount of 'watchers' your thread has would give a better idea of how many people are enjoying the story. Of course, there's a margin for error with people who stopped reading but didn't stop watching etc, but overall I think it'd do a lot for the confidence of writers on the site, and help them continue writing when comments and likes are slow in coming.

 

Yes, the currently viewing display does help, and I thank you guys for adding it but it's a very incomplete method as I'm sure you can understand.

Posting and then frantically refreshing for the next 20 minutes to see who pops in and out becomes unfeasible once those numbers become too big to check for new names coming in XD

Even then, time zones etc make it a very unreliable source of information if your goal is a 'good idea of how many people read.'

Thank you for your response

 

Now I'm picturing some sort of script that tracks the "viewing this thread" over 24 or 48 hours or so. That would only get you immediate views, not some guy reading through later, but maybe you could manually track the change in peak readership.

 

Running that over the first 48 hours after updating sounds like an interesting idea... I might be able to set something like that up at some point, probably not before summer though. Time is short enough as is xD

 

I screwed up specifying number lol, it was meant to be lightweight. I guess if you're running the script on your own machine that would work fine too.

 

As a little update on this. I just made a very basic version of a tool that does this in the last hour or so. I'll update it to something more user friendly when I have some time and share it with you guys

The pure functionality is that it allows you to log into a QQ account (which you can make it remember), navigate to a thread by link, and then it'll refresh the thread every 10 seconds while tracking the 'users who are actively viewing' bit of the page, tallying the unique views, giving you the names and amount.

This is an app that runs actively on your machine though, which means that it'll absolutely eat your bandwith if you are on a limited data plan.

 

This sounds like a great idea.

How would this compare to the "Traffic stats" tool in the ffnet profile?

I'd almost say let's look at it another way -- each thread has a raw count of views displayed, can that be broken down to display as views / day and accessed in the User's control panel for all their created threads, or something?

I would be thrilled to be able to look at that kind of thing, but I just dunno how accessible some of those metrics are to the developer. I dunno what would be "easy" vs. "impossible" to deliver, so I'm just wondering what would be "easy."

 

I mean, it can go pretty far. For now it's basically a glorified view counter.

I ran it over the last few hours while there was no activity (posts) in my thread. I would expect nobody to care, but...



Currently focussing on some other work, and the next chapter of my quest. After that I'll look into some data visualisation, see if I can't make something nice that keeps tracking it as long as the tool runs, followed by some data saving and all.

It's worth noting, that this is a seperate application that runs on your machine in real time. It is not an integration with QQ. This means that all information collected will be shown in the application, and only 'events' that happen while the tool is running will be collected.

This means that if it's not running while you update a chapter, you'll miss that spike of activity in your data. Currently I do not see ways to solve this.

 

Based on Daniel's reference to "raw view count" being displayed, I assumed they were thinking of something forum-side.

Hitting the page every ten seconds for the personal tool seems awfully high -- I seem to recall that the "now viewing" is only updated every some number of minutes. Would checking once a minute be sufficient?

 

The 'now viewing' is actually very much near instant. I checked it with a friend, and while it took a while for the page to realise they were 'gone' if they closed the tab, it was instant when they switched to another page in QQ. This is most likely because they 'register' themselves as entering the page, which causes the system to remove them from the old.

The 'thing' with increasing the time is that it decreases accuracy because of this. People that come in to check a recently posted message and then leave again could very well be skipped if the time was a minute. Of course, were you to only use it to check traffic towards a (longer) chapter, then such a longer time would still work. Regardless, if I were to release this I'd ensure there would be an option for the frequency of checks. Much as I'd add information for 'time spent' in the thread.

I've been thinking a bit about this, and I'm slowly starting to settle on what remains morally responsible for the tool to track. For example, if someone were to set their privacy settings to not show them reading a thread then the tool will also skip them.

 

Is there any tool to view total number of people that have viewed your thread?

 

How is a 'view' counted anyway? Does it count if someone repeatedly opens a thread within a short timeframe like on ff.net?

Also, even if it's not views, having a counter for how many people watched a thread visible for the author would be nice.
Something like the favourites or followers on ff.net.