Geeklog Forums

Hi,

I like to have the number of story views shown so my writers can see how popular or not their stories are. But with very short stories there's no need for users to click on "read more" as the whole story is on the front page, and so the hit counter doesn't go up much. This can make people think the story hasn't been read much - say 50 hits in amongst stories with 300 hits. Now of course there is no way of knowing whether people read the story, but is there a way I can stop "views" showing when the story was just a short one without the "read more" option?

Maybe if that isn't possible, perhaps I could do something like not display views if hits < 150, since it's unlikely more than 150 people would click on such a story if there's no "read more" (I think some people just click on the title no realising it's a short story, or they follow a link to the story from another site).

A related question is, when someone uses RSS to look at a story, does that show up as a hit?

Thanks,
Brett
www.worldfootynews.com

No. The view counter is only increased when you look at a story on the article page (article.php).

bye, Dirk

That explains the RSS question (which means we may be much more widely read and don't realise it).

But any suggestions to stop stories of less than xx characters having the story count? Or stories having less than xx hits having the hit count show?

Assuming you are on 1.4.0 or higher, search lib-story.php for

if( $_CONF['hideviewscount'] != 1 ) {

and make it

if( $_CONF['hideviewscount'] != 1 && $A['hits'] > 150 && !empty($bodytext) ) {

Thank you VERY much for that. It was exactly what I was after. I've currently implemented it with just the empty bodytext check, not the number of views check. It does exactly what I wanted.

Cheers!

I've been very happily using this for the last couple of years, except $A['hits'] isn't actually available in lib-story.php at this point (I don't think) so what I did was:




So that worked fine, except I just noticed that stories over 1000 hits were not showing. I eventually realised that returns a formatted string with a comma in it, so 1000 is 1,000. So the operator treats it as two numbers, 1 and 000. So the logic returned is that 1 is not > 150, so the hits are not displayed. I demonstrated it to myself by setting hits for a story (in the database) to 151,000 and the views number was once again being displayed. 151 is > 150.

I thought ok, I need to get at the original unformatted hits or remove the comma. I couldn't see simply how to do the former so I did the latter, with an inelegant fix:



so it strips out the comma and the result is compared with 150.

But this assumes the user has commas to separate 1000s. That's all we offer on our site, but who knows one day.

Digging around I could see that $story is an instance of a class and it has $_hits in it, but it's a private member and I have no idea how to get at it. I don't want to stuff around with changing your classes, customisations like this are already a hassle to maintan. So I'll probably stick with what I've got unless there is a very simple fix? I guess I could query the database (by copying other examples) to populate $A as required for the original suggestion.