Hi all, We all know that the blogs on GardenStew are a very popular feature but sometimes I used to think to myself that the blog view numbers on the blogs page looked inaccurate. And this morning something occured to me and the reality is that they are. Let me explain: when a visitor goes to your blog then a view is added to its view counter. Pretty simple stuff. But the thing is that the blog system was also counting visits from non-human visitors. A non-human visitor will be a program that visits the page for some reason or another e.g. Google has a program that visits the pages so that they know what to put into their search results. These non-human visits were inflating the numbers and for that reason I decided to ask you all whether the views should be reset. It would mean the views return to zero but when they start to rise again you will see a much more accurate representation of how your blog is doing. IMO this is only fair because the order the blogs appear in on the blogs page is decided by the view count. For example at the moment my blog is top of the list but there are many more blogs on the site that should be above mine! So I have set up a poll, let me know what you think. If you decide not to reset then I will still not count all of the non-human visits and the blogs page will show a more accurate representation over time. Lastly I want to apologise for this. When I realised it this morning I was kicking myself.
I said yes, even though I don't have a blog, so you may discount it if you like. My thought is simply that accurate numbers (if you would like counters at all) are always preferred to artificially inflated ones. I admit, if I had the time to keep one I would prefer to toggle off the counter option myself.
I also voted yes, although it makes no difference to me. The fact is, today is the first time I ever looked at my numbers. Dooley pointed them out to me. DR
I voted yes. I would like to know that what Im putting up is helping someone else. And no it isnt a "popularity" contest. But it is about numbers. And heres why. My rose blog does great so I know thats where I need to have the most details and helpful info. But what I didnt know was that my Living with depress blog was being hit big time too.I do now, thanks to Frank. This is a blog I am wanting to work on. Not because its a "popular" blog and it brings my numbers up. Because its helping ppl. I could care less about about the numbers IF I knew what I writtin in my blog was being read...in turn, helping someone else.
Most of the time I don't notice the numbers. I looked at them when Frank put them at the top of the blogs. I notice more when I'm posting because I was watching how close we got to 20,000 posts. Mostly I post or blog for fun. If someone reads the blogs okay but it's personal so I don't worry about it if no one does. I like the communication on the posts or blogs more than how many read it. I voted to reset it because if it's wrong it needs to be corrected. Dooley
Hi all, Ok I have made the changes to only count visits to your blog from human visitors, not from search engines spiders. The blog visit counters have been reset to zero so now we should see an accurate picture of blog visits
