Question about views

[ws23rt]

How does the column called views work?   My question comes from a curiosity about how many people spend time reading posts?  Are they everyone that looks at the posts or only signed on members? 

One of the things I like about this site is the lack of clutter from adds It would be interesting to know how many people come here per day/month/etc.

[Troy]

A view is counted whenever the server has to generate the page. This is an open forum so anyone can read it - not just members. To be honest, a lot of members browse the site when they aren't logged in (at work or using someone elses computer for instance).

If you go to the forum index page and scroll to the bottom you'll see a small section called "Forum Stats". There's a link called "[More Stats]" that will take you to this page: http://www.dodgecharger.com/forum/index.php?action=stats Those are statistics that the forum collects - not the entire web site.

I can get more statistics from a few other sources. Some statistics are for the server as a whole and some break it down by actual people (best guess) vs internet robots/spiders (search engines or bad guys). Certain times of year are busier than others. Here's a sample:

Month	Visits	Unique Visitors	Page Views	Hits	Total Hits	Bandwidth	Total BW
September (last full month)	300,738	183,446	3,114,605	8,037,816	10,233,450	115 GB	148 GB
July 2014	336,227	201,042	3,327,469	9,104,167	11,564,125	118 GB	177 GB
December 2013	330,155	193,645	3,623,695	9,966,542	13,193,538	124 GB	168 GB

The daily averages are about 10,500 visits, 115,000 page views, and 3.5 GB of bandwidth.

So, your point about ads helps me make a point. All those "hits" are requests to the server. The bulk of those are images (other than the actual page requests) as well as a large percentage of the bandwidth. When people complain about posting pictures here it's easy to see why allowing bigger pictures could have a dramatic effect! Imagine doubling the size of uploaded files and then shipping them across the internet 6-7 million times per month. The things that cost the most money when running a server: bandwidth, hard drive space, memory. To increase any of them means I need more money.

Another interesting note: the average length for a "visit" is just under 6 minutes. In any given month we have roughly 13,000 visits lasting longer than an hour and 40,000+ lasting longer than 15 minutes. Hopefully that means we're giving people a good reason to stick around.

Lastly, I just noticed the 6th most used Operating System is the Wii and 8th is Sony Playstation.

Troy