Short attention span readers, p'raps? A useful metric would be a listing of viewers as well as favers...

It would, but I do not expect the statistics gathering capability of Fur Affinity to be improved within our lifetimes. :)

True enow.

Say, an idea if you want more hits/reads: Have a look at  eocostello's gallery. See the thumbnails he uses? Pics of Annie and/or Gibson might get you a few more views...

It's an interesting thought. I will eventually get art for the story one way or another -- I'd like to write more with the characters and possibly do an ebook novella series sort of thing, with "Going Concerns" the free opener. (Not that the others would be really expensive if I tried that...)

Does it record views, or individual viewers? If it's the former, the variations may be due to varying numbers of rereads.

I don't know. My suspicion is merely views because, let's face it, FA is not running on the world's most advanced code base. :)

As far as I can tell, FA is on the number of different viewers. The same person hitting a page ten times a day for a week gives that page '1' view, not '70' ... Sadly that doesn't mean they actually read the page, only that they were on the page at some point.

I *may* have spiked the first chapter a bit by posting it as a journal bumping your stories. http://www.furaffinity.net/journal/6940141/

Ah ha! I didn't think about that, but quite likely.

(You may have just also provided a data point for a discussion between another FWG member and myself from the other day...)

As I commented to Mel White the other day: Scientifically-speaking, I'd much rather handle dynamite than statistics, dynamite's much more predictable.

The later chapters may also get more of an up-tick if a keyword brought them up. If all have the same key words and I was doing a search by most resent, your latest at that time would be the first I'd see. A little reading would then determine if I liked the writing style enough to go check out the rest of it. (or it might warn me away! )

They all do have the same keywords. I'm not sure they're particularly good keywords, but they're at least consistent!

Some people hunt for cute wolves - though I think yours would give them pause ...

It's interesting that this is the tenth comment, yet only the first to raise the startling possibility that FA may have bugs.

Well, when I wrote "FA is not running on the world's most advanced code base," there were... certain implications. :) I doubt it's just pulling numbers out of a hat, virtually speaking, but its inaccuracies are likely to be consistent across chapters, as it were -- something that claims to have 200 views probably has roughly the number of views of something that claims to have 100. No guarantees of that, of course, but it's a plausible operating theory. I suspect Wolf's link is likely responsible for the big discrepancy in chapter 1's reads.

(That should have said, of course, "roughly TWICE the number of views." Otherwise something even worse than we all suspect is going on.)

My guess is that it's a bug. I've read every chapter (and generated at least two views for each, I imagine, since I've been mailing the links to myself to read on my phone).

It's possible, although I suspect some are "drive-bys," as it were: people who click on the current chapter because it showed up on the front page but don't read anything else.

That could be, too. I've honestly never paid attention to my stats. XD

     Quickie report to confirm: Stats on all my stories show the same sort of pattern. Almost all are
'multi-page' stories, several darn huuuge.

     I'm going an extra mile too. I cut a script that I run on a daily basis. It captures all the stats pages,
then peels out the #s for all subs posted in two accounts (over 600 subs). Then drops the data into a
spreadsheet so I can make sense out of what's being read. I'm tracking all subs on a day-to-day
basis.

     Splendidly geeky thing to do. :- ) Debatable how useful.



     Almost every story shows a real spread in view counts from the first sub to the last. Which puzzled the
snot out of me at first. The pattern ought to be, high counts on the first pages, then dropping down
smoothly as some readers decide to stop reading at various points.

     Nope: Not what we get. Spiky numbers, not smooth. Is FA's page counter code borked, and is it failing
to capture views? Dunno.

     Alternate theory: The way FA works, people will trip over any given sub in a multi-sub doc almost at
random, and may not read further. Tick up a random view count. Or, they may get curious, then go
back to page one and start reading. Then some will stop a few pages in.

     Result: A pattern of view counts that only poorly reflects how many people read the whole puppy. Can
think of ways to improve on this, but moah script won't help. Need to pry the hood off FA's codebase
and do some tinkering.



     Lemme lift up... <Creak!> Wow, who'd have thought you could cram so many hamsters on wheels into
a server? :- )

 fwbrown61

That is a lot of work to go to for tracking. :)

Your alternate theory about tripping over given pieces of a multi-submission work is about the same as my drive-by theory: somebody sees it on the front page and clicks, especially if you've gone to the trouble to make a pretty icon and everything, but doesn't necessarily follow up by going back to the first chapter.

I wouldn't be surprised if FA's view counter is a bit flaky, of course, although in my experience page counters are sadly more likely to overestimate than underestimate...

     Looked at the stats page carefully, realized it's negative-useful for actually gauging
how my work's doing. The data is current, not historical, can't really be analyzed
(since stuck on an FA page).

     Fortunately, stats-scan2 was a dead-simple program to write; not-a-lot-of-work,
in other words. Almost certain I'm the only one on FA who's doing this.

     Since I've got historical data in paw, I've been able to see several view count 'glitches,'
as a range of sub numbers suddenly go weird. Called in a TT a couple of times, much
to the confusion of some poor Admin. :- )



     'S probable that FA's view counter code is quite robust. How to record views and hits is the
most well-solved software problem on the Internet.

      But: That code relies on a raft of DBs and data structures and temp files, all sitting
on a busy server, and *not* as robust. If those get interfered with our view counts get
temporarily borked. And a sysadmin snarls like rabid to try and fix things.



     C'mon you hamsters, back on those wheels. Don't make me use the whip. <Ka-pish!>
<Squeal!!>

     Oh crud, they're putting on tiny handcuffs and ball gags. I think they're starting to like it. :- )

 fwbrown61