It's not really based on views. It's based on the number of members that read a thread in the past 48 hours. A single member could read a thread many times during that period but it only counts as 1 user in the query that generates the table. Think of it as the top 50 threads that have the widest readership, not necessarily the most frequently read.

I do intend on adding the yellow/purple folders (red dots too) to the list of topics too. Just didn't have time to get around to that today.

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It never occurred to me before that the number under the "read" column on the regular forum pages was just logged-in members, but I guess that must be true too.

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Another thing about the number of views is that it is filtered to only record one view of a thread every 15 minutes per user unlike most other forum software (unless a new post is made within the 15 minutes) . Most other forums record one read every time a user refreshes the page. We also don't record views from search engine bots so our number of views of a thread is a very realistic representation of the actual number of views and not just people refreshing to see if there's new posts in a topic.

The data used for the number of reads is derived from a different set of data. I keep track of which forum users read which threads with a timestamp by user id. (The timestamp is not counted when a user clicks the 'mark all topics read' link. It's only actual reads.) This data is used to properly generate the yellow/blue folders and redirect a user to the posts that they haven't read yet when they open a new topic. I don't keep this info for guests because they have a randomly generated, temporary internal user id that expires at the end of their session. A single person/guest would be recorded as multiple users.

I kinda like the info because we actually see what members are reading. These are the people that participate and contribute to the community. I think using this data is a more accurate representation of what's of interest. It's not watered down by search engine referrals or traffic from blogs which could significantly skew the results at times.

Why do you feel the results are disconcerting? Are you not reading the popular threads? I find that I only have read 3 - 5 threads that are on that list.

Edited by - Drew Black on 3/14/2007 6:21:16 AM

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