Carleas - a million views?

I just noticed that Iambiguous’ thread Philosophy in Song is on its way to a million and a half views. Is that really the case???

Wow. I mean, that is impressive. Whatever my displeasure has been at him as a discussion partner, the man managed something I would have considered nearly impossible in a small forum like this one. And since those threads are not meant as discussions, more power to him.

If he added a little bit of notes to the videos - like and here Björk weighs in on free will in the chorus - he’d have some kind of quirky online encyclopedia ready made.

Nope, you can’t trust the view counts. I’ve noticed times when over a period of days the views on particular threads seem to shoot up dramatically…then drop precipitously. Who the hell really knows what unfolds behind the curtains of technology this complex.

Or, sure, maybe I spend hour after hour after hour after hour after hour on all of my threads…clicking on them. Or pay others to.

Besides, I call the thread “philosophy in song” and half the damn posts are instrumentals!!

Note to others:

Join me here – ilovephilosophy.com/viewtop … 1&t=196034 – to discuss [philosophically] Karpel Curly’s obsession with me. Help me to figure out what makes his “visceral/intuitive/deep-down-inside-me” Self tick.

:wink:

Unfortunately, I tend to agree with iambiguous. While I haven’t confirmed this, I don’t think the views have ever “drop[ped] precipitously”, I don’t know think phpBB is set up to do that and I’m (hopefully) the only person with sufficient access to do it manually. But we do get a lot of bots, and I would think a popular thread that frequently links to one of the most popular sites on the internet would be one that is frequently scraped by bots.

I’m not sure how professional SEO types distinguish between bots and humans, but I could believe that bots account for more than a third of hits. Heck, I’d believe that bots account for more than two-thirds of hits. Looking at Google Analytics, which probably knows what it’s doing in terms of estimating traffic from humans, they say we get about 200 users a day. A naive estimate taking that as constant across all the years that the Philosophy in Song thread has existed (which is not true, traffic is 50-60% lower than what it was 10 years ago), that’s 2003659 = 657000. That’s not a great estimate, but it probably gives a better idea of what’s likely to be the true view count than phpBB’s even more naive rubric of “add 1 every time that page is loaded”.

There’s a lot of noise in all these estimates, so take them with a truckload of salt, but short answer is no, that thread hasn’t gotten over a million views (yet).

OK, thanks. What do bots get out of visiting a thread?

By dropping precipitously I didn’t mean the number of views was actually less than before but that the increase in views from day to each day had dropped significantly. I’d notice the view count going up over a 100 a day for a while and then suddenly it would only go up 10 or so. Especially on my quote and song threads.

Though let’s face it most threads that revolve around music tend to collect a lot of views.

Am I to understand that “bots scraping data” generate hits in Php’s reporting of views? That information challenges assumptions reciprocally.

Thanks for the information, I am an ever so tiny bit less ignorant. One small baby step for a child, and one giant leap for an adolescent? LOL.

This is a good question, and I don’t really know the answer. I know we get scraped by all the major search engines (except for one that I had to block recently because it was scraping us so vigorously that the site was nearly inaccessible). I assume there’s a lot of research scraping, e.g. advertizers looking for mentions of products or trying to connect words to identify promising behavioral advertizing leads. The recently released GPT-3 was trained on a lot web text (among other things), so I assume there are bots crawling for this kind of research as well.

Then there are malicious bots, e.g. bots trying to guess passwords or find unprotected directories or do SQL injection attacks. I don’t know how they work, or if they tend to crawl around sites in a way that would create views for individual threads, but I know we get lots of them. There may also be bots that crawl the web looking for sites like this to spam with ads, because we get a lot of link spamming.

I assume there are other purposes, both nefarious and benign.

Ah, my mistake. I expect the first derivative does rise and fall, as the zombie scrapers shamble past and fix their dead but all consuming gaze upon us.

To be fair to phpBB, I don’t actually know how their page views are counted. I’m pretty sure that some bots are excluded, e.g. the big search engines actually have user accounts and I’m pretty sure their scraping is ignored. But less well known/above board scrapers that aren’t recognized are probably seen as human, and I think it would be counted as a ‘view’ every time they request a page. But again, I may be wrong. This also may have changed in more recent versions, our instance is a bit out of date.

Is .is it possible that individual themes can be configured to search for aggregate interphases in developing AI type configured modes?

Dont ask me what “I” mean by this. If so, the program may set to subset, ad infinitum( absurdum)