I just noticed way off to the right of each thread it says how many views there have been? What is the definition of a view? If I refresh a thread does it go up each time, or does it mean how many different people have viewed it?

Well, I don't know the answer for sure, but I just viewed this thread in as many ways as I could think while remaining logged as me, and it kept showing one view, so I'd guess it was based on number of people (might include guests, i.e., non-logged people, which could skew the results up).

As far as I'm aware most 'view' statistics are by ip. On most forums I've been on and read up on it's what it's said at least :)

A view in vBulletin is any page load within the thread by anyone, so literally any sort of page view, repeat or unique. Why you don't see the counters updating immediately is because it's only done once per hour to save server resources.

Thanks Tal.

However, that does seem odd. I'm not sure how that is useful information as opposed to unique views.

How would you define a unique view? IPs can change, so you can't consistently track people by that unless they have a fixed IP. Also, IPs of unregistered viewers aren't stored longer than their session's duration.

Cookies would be another option, but many people have cookies turned off.

You could track logged in members only 100% accurately, but that'd be ignoring the much larger unregistered/logged out viewership.

So it depends on what you'd consider useful information... as they are, views show exactly how many times each thread has been loaded, and this information is 100% correct and encompasses everyone. Pretty much any other tracking method wouldn't be either as correct or as encompassing.

There's also the question of resource usage... if you logged every IP that hits every thread for future checks, you'd wind up with a) a ton of space used over time by IP data not usable for anything else but the view counter and b) huge resource demands on the server if every thread's IP log had to be checked at every thread load.

It's not that it'd be impossible to do, just impractical.

I think this is fair. It could be abused if someone wished to increase the views on a thread for some reason but I doubt that happens very much.

I have certain threads I view each time I come to SP because they have been updated and occasionally I might revisited a thread just to refresh my mind.

There are some checks in place to prevent abuse and to bring the abusers to our attention, so anyone wanting to play with the counters too much would likely find themselves banned.