Click meter?

October 7, 2004 11:50 PM

You know what would be cool? A click count or popularity meter indicator on each FP thread, showing how many people took a look at it. [MI]
posted by spacewrench to feature requests at 11:50 PM (29 comments total)

Currently, there's the count of [new] comments added, but that doesn't tell you how many people checked out the story and/or comments. I'd like to know how many people hit the subject link, and how many looked at the comment stream.

I think it might even help improve post crafting -- you could see what enticed people to click around or inside, and the more clicking, the better the post, right? Maybe there could even be a separate "clickmap" page that would show aggregate click patterns: given this post, people hit the first link, then the fourth link, then came back and read the comments, etc.
posted by spacewrench at 11:55 PM on October 7, 2004

The big wrinkle in this feature is that I would have to rewrite all the URLs so that I could track them (http://foo.com/ becomes http://www.metafilter.com/linktracker.mefi?url=http://foo.com), and every link hit would require doing a write to the database, which is a performance hit.

Fark has this, is it really useful info?
posted by mathowie at 12:12 AM on October 8, 2004

A compromise would be listing only the local click-thoughs (to the comment page). This would save performance by eliminating the URL rewrite mathowie indicates; and it would be pretty cool unto itself.
posted by squirrel at 12:26 AM on October 8, 2004

You'd still get the db hit on every comment page load.
posted by mathowie at 12:29 AM on October 8, 2004

I know it wouldn't make much difference to me, certainly not enough to add to the load of the db and affect performance. If there was a way to do it without slowing down the site then it'd be a neat little thing to look at now and then, I guess.

I should think watching to see what posts generate decent threads is a better way to learn how to craft a post.
posted by Salmonberry at 12:52 AM on October 8, 2004

I could care less, but I won't because then I'd have to actively try to care less which would ironically involve more work.

So no.
posted by The God Complex at 1:06 AM on October 8, 2004

Would simply using disk files work? I know there's locking issues, but you could use a crazy scheme where everytime there's a local clickthrough, a single byte is echoed into a file titled with the thread's number. To read the number of posts, get the file size in bytes.
posted by namespan at 1:07 AM on October 8, 2004

The president doesn't need polls, and neither do I.
posted by kaibutsu at 1:37 AM on October 8, 2004

The big wrinkle in this feature is that I would have to rewrite all the URLs so that I could track them (http://foo.com/ becomes http://www.metafilter.com/linktracker.mefi?url=http://foo.com), and every link hit would require doing a write to the database, which is a performance hit.

(emph. mine)

Is each MeFi post a physically separate page? It's not a template?
posted by SpaceCadet at 1:39 AM on October 8, 2004

No spacecadet, I mean I'd have to rewrite URLs on the fly in all main link posts.
posted by mathowie at 1:42 AM on October 8, 2004

namespan: since you concede you're going to have to lock files, you might as well increment a counter in that file and not use all that disk space. And while you're at it, instead of using a file why not put it in a database table? Oh look, there's a sign up there! I wonder what it says:

"This is square one. Welcome back."

not meant as snarky as it may sound, merely trying to point out the facts and equivalencies
posted by fvw at 2:06 AM on October 8, 2004

No spacecadet, I mean I'd have to rewrite URLs on the fly in all main link posts.

I thought you could trigger a count increment inside the page itself and not from a URL parameter (which, you're right, would be a nightmare in making sure all links had the URL parameter in it). I guess this "linktracker.mefi" is the reason why you're saying what you're saying....
posted by SpaceCadet at 2:12 AM on October 8, 2004

Really don't see the point, same as with the number of posts to a thread, volume is no guarantee of quality. PoliticalFilter stuff will get high counts. And if it's extra work for Matt then even more so, there are better things he can be doing!
posted by biffa at 2:41 AM on October 8, 2004

This pony would be nice to add to the corral, but I don't see it improving the bloodstock of the herd.
posted by sciurus at 3:12 AM on October 8, 2004

I thought you could trigger a count increment inside the page itself

Yeah, when you hit the page template you have to grab the info from the db anyway for a given id. You could update the counter at the same time. But it would be another query or a really interesting one.
posted by yerfatma at 4:33 AM on October 8, 2004

I hate sites that count click throughs. I'm not opposed to the tally but every implementation I've seen has from time to time been unusable. Something really popular gets posted, the database server gets saturated and now you can't even reach the link because the actual URL is obsfucated. One of the big lessons from 9/11 that nobody remembers is that simple content is better if your actual goal is to provide a resource. I bet a lot of sites will forget this Nov 2nd as well and I think this is going to be the most watched campaign so far.

Matt's smart and has integrity so I don't think he'd obsfucate URLs (I think that the obsfucation on some sites is so that the site owner can show off their click throughs in a bid to prove that an ad on their site has value even though the two types of click throughs are unrelated)

They also tend to degenerate things into a video game. Some of the best posts I've seen have only had a handful of posts saying "beautiful", "gorgeous" etc. Some of the worst posts have had over a hundred posts and countless people lurking within the post to rubberneck at the accident.
posted by substrate at 4:41 AM on October 8, 2004

what kalibutsu said
posted by matteo at 5:22 AM on October 8, 2004

Or: 123 clicks! I win! U=T0t411y pwned!
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 5:38 AM on October 8, 2004

Just to expand a bit : it's not a freakin' competition.

'The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.' -some guy.
posted by stavrosthewonderchicken at 6:04 AM on October 8, 2004

I don't know if this is possible with ColdFusion, but in other systems (php, asp, e.g.) one can maintain the info in persistent variables that are written to the db on a schedule so the performance hit is minimal. This works, of course, only if instantaneous updating is not required. I don't happen to think click-through information is required or desirable but the engineer in me can't help but think of ways to do things even if those things don't need doing.
posted by TimeFactor at 6:49 AM on October 8, 2004

What the chicken said. Part of the reason things get so ugly around here is because people think they're defined by their front page posts. Thus, a criticism of a post is seen as a personal attack. It's not. Conversely, a post with a lot of comments is seen as a gold star. It's not.

Just post what you (not you, spacewrench) think is interesting, bearing in mind the double post and self-link rules, and try to stay away from single-links to editorials. If there are loud objections to your post, consider their validity, but don't take it personally. And don't think that, just because there was a lot of activity on your death penalty post, it was necessarily beneficial to the site.

So this is a good suggestion, and could provide some interesting data, but aside from the performance hit it would put on the server, I don't think it's really necessary. And it would just add another level to the bickering about what's a good post and what's not.
posted by jpoulos at 6:50 AM on October 8, 2004

Oh well, <radner>never mind</radner>

It's been a while since I fooled with this stuff, but instead of hitting the database, couldn't you push the work out to the client? You can count thread clicks just with the server logs, of course (and maybe update the popularity meter when a new comment is posted), and munge off-site links in such a way that the client keeps track of which were visited (and does the unmunging itself, without a trip to MF). You could upload the offsite-click info occasionally when the client's doing some other interaction that requires a DB hit anyway.

Are you hitting the DB on every FP->thread clickthrough? Or even on every FP load? Yikes.
posted by spacewrench at 7:03 AM on October 8, 2004

Are you hitting the DB on every FP->thread clickthrough? Or even on every FP load? Yikes.

Well it looks like that when I peek through my browser window.....everytime I load a 200+ on a MeFi thread for example, the entire thread is pulled from the database every time I access the thread - it isn't cached on MeFi. Given that, why is one extra DB call going to hurt? Maybe it's the "waffer-thin mint" that blows up the fat guy.....
posted by SpaceCadet at 7:17 AM on October 8, 2004

volume is no guarantee of quality.

Reminds me of the site I maintain for work. We have a "most popular reports" section on the homepage along with a "most recent reports" section. It was accurately pointed out to me that the numbers on the most popular would go up simply because people would click to see what all the fuss was about, therefore making the most popular appear even more popular.

I agree with the volume is no guarantee of quality assessment. This is a useless feature, IMHO. The "recent" comments and "most comments" filter usually provide a good barometer of threads that interest people.
posted by terrapin at 8:54 AM on October 8, 2004

in other systems (php, asp, e.g.) one can maintain the info in persistent variables that are written to the db on a schedule so the performance hit is minimal.

ColdFusion has an Application scope you could store these things in, but then you'd be storing an array of every thread that you need to report on, so that would get ugly quicky. This is mentioned solely from a technical standpoint. I agree with the sentiment that attractiveness is not a 1:1 correlation with value. Unless some supermodel is watching.
posted by yerfatma at 10:22 AM on October 8, 2004

fvw: I was thinking of invoking the count via shell command, and letting the OS/shellprog take care of the locking issue. Don't know if that's naive or not...
posted by namespan at 11:43 AM on October 8, 2004

Forking and execing won't improve performance, even on systems with a lean fork(). On unix you could indeed do open("file", O_APPEND) and write a single bite, I assume windows has something similar, but I don't see how it would be any more efficient or easy to write than just using a lock on the file. Both would be a lot less efficient than just updating a counter on the database though. Remember, databases are optimised and faster than writing loose files for these purposes, after all that's one of the reasons they're used.

Mmm, I love MeTa technical discussions first thing in the morning.
posted by fvw at 5:10 PM on October 8, 2004

perhaps you need one of those fancy "web counters" i've been hearing so much about. If i understand it correctly, it increments a little counter everytime someone visits a page!
posted by bob sarabia at 12:44 PM on October 9, 2004

look at it go!
posted by bob sarabia at 12:45 PM on October 9, 2004