Hello dear members,
Addressing the issues on the photo view counter. I'll need to explain a few things so please bare with me.
On 2022-07-29 a refactor of the counter was deployed, which changed how the views are counted.
Previous to this date the views were being counted on the server side as was on the old site. This means that
all photo page requests resulted in a new view added to the counter. No matter if the page was eventually served to the user, if the user closed the page, clicked on a link or even clicked on the back button immediately (lets say less than 1s) after requesting the page. Also all requests from bots (search engine indexing bots, ...) and generated link previews in various applications (Whatsapp, Messenger, ... just to name a few) resulted in a new view being counted.
As you probably can imagine this is not representative of the "User" views.
Just so there is a clearer picture here are the total daily numbers around the day of the deployment:
| Day | ShipSpotting Photo Views | Google Analytics Photo Views |
2022-08-02 | 10,728 | 19,785 |
2022-08-01 | 10,118 | 19,273 |
2022-07-31 | 9,301 | 17,276 |
2022-07-30 | 9,133 | 15,911 |
2022-07-29 | 87,098 | 16,616 |
2022-07-28 | 118,043 | 19,362 |
2022-07-27 | 121,972 | 17,492 |
2022-07-26 | 106,090 | 16,281 |
From 2022-07-30 forward photo all views are counted on the client side, this means that the user requests the photo page to the server and only when the page finishes loading on the user's browser there is a request back to the serve to count a new view for that photo.
This represents a more accurate view count, but it is not without it's disadvantages.
There are circumstances where this request to count a new view can fail even if the user is in fact viewing it.
Some of them could be:
- server being too busy to process the request
- user having adblock enabled (this view count request is flagged as an advertisement pixeltag by some adblockers)
- an instable/very slow internet connection (the request can timeout)
Further to this, and is common to both methods of counting views as it comes from the old site, the counted views are buffered for some time on the database for each combination of photo id and user IP address. Only then they are processed and counted for the corresponding photo.
I believe this was implemented to prevent artificially increasing the view count by repeatedly refreshing the photo page.
Here, in the buffer, is where I believe the issues are occurring, as nowadays the IP address is not a true indication of a unique visitor.
Long gone are the days when each user had it's own unique IP.
This buffer is up for refactoring soon, with the expectation that it will result in a more accurate view count.
Hope this post creates a clearer picture of the process and answers at least some of your questions.
Cheers
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