The number of views of the topic within the topic.

[User2]

Hello.
There is a wish. I want to see how many views a topic has within a topic.
Why is this necessary? Sometimes I follow the link to the topic. In this case, I have no way of knowing how many views the topic has.
In the screenshot, I showed a red rectangle where I would like to see the number of views of the topic.

[Aleksi "Lex" Kilpinen]

I believe this is something that was specifically removed in 2.1, and since we still display the number of views elsewhere I think it should be an easy thing to add back as a small mod, if someone really wants it.
The stat is easily misleading though, and so not as useful as one might think at first.

[Arantor]

Yes, I removed it. It's a completely useless stat because it will be influenced by bots and in no way represents the most interesting topics on a site.

If you need any examples, I give you the most viewed topics on this site, which are in order:
* a conference survey (opened 2012, last post 2012, 52 replies, 3.7M views)
* a PHP security warning (opened 2012, last post 2012, 21 replies, 3.6M views)
* the release announcement of SMF 1.0 beta 1 (opened 2003, last post 2003, 152 replies, 3.0M views)
* the release of 2.0.3/1.1.17/1.0.23 (opened 2012, last post 2013, 181 replies, 2.9M views)
* the EOL announcement for SMF 1.0 (opened 2012, last post 2012, 59 replies, 2.8M views)
* the announcement of the Big Boards group (opened 2008, last post 2008, 45 replies, 2.8M views)
* the support topic for the Aeva mod (opened 2007, last reply 2015, 7172 replies, 2.7M views)
* the release of 2.0.1/1.1.15 (opened 2011, last reply 2011, 175 replies, 2.5M views)
* an announcement of server maintenance for this site (opened 2011, last reply 2012, 50 replies, 2.4M views)
* the support topic for the Pretty URLs mod (opened 2007, last reply 2024, 8369 replies, 2.4M views)


As a couple more data points, most replied to topics:
* the support topic for AJAX Chat mod (opened 2008, last reply 2015, 9111 replies, 2.4M views, would probably 11th on the last
* Pretty URLs from above in 2nd place
* support topic for Ad Management mod (opened 2006, last reply 2024, 8063 replies, 2.0M views)
* Aeva from above comes in 4th
* the general off-topic chat topic in the Bosnia/Croatia/Serbia board (opened 2010, last reply 2023, 6620 replies, 1.4M views)

There's no useful correlation with time, or visibility or even particularly with numbers of replies (where you'd assume that conversations implicitly trigger views with back and forth discussions) but they don't.

Honestly, if I'd had my way, I'd have cut out tracking that entirely because as far as I'm concerned, it's just computational effort for less than no value - a wrong, inaccurate number that tells you nothing is worse than no number.

[User2]

Then it is logical to remove the number of views from the forum altogether.
Now, after all, the number of views has remained in another place.

[Arantor]

Like I said, if I had had my way it would have been removed entirely but I was overruled.

[User2]

I have a topic that has been viewed 317 times, and there is a topic that has been viewed 1,000 times.
Probably if only bots watched the topics, then the topics would have the same number of views.
So did people view the topics after all?

[Aleksi "Lex" Kilpinen]

Over time, that logic inevitably breaks. The more replies, the more time, the more views too. And for public topics, after some time it turns in to really just a random number that doesn't reflect real user interaction anymore, because bots and crawlers are unpredictable and illogical, and designed to repeatedly visit the same URLs time and time again.

[Doug Heffernan]

@User2, as you can see this isn't going to be added as a built in feature. You will have better chances if you request it as a mod instead, with the option to not count bots viewing of topics in the overall topic view count.