Does anybody read the Announcements?

[Promaginy]

I was reviewing the past 5 months of posts to the announcements board and the average number of views per topic is like 8, 15, etc. Yet there were 100s of topic viewings in Dec 2006.

Has there been a change in the board membership? Or are people just so hard at work that they are not reading the announcements?

[electronicStar]

I think there is a problem in the way the topic views are counted anyway. I've notice the number of views is always very low but it is inaccurate.
I once noticed a thread marked with 0 views but I knew I had read it once already, so there must be some sort of problem.

[soniCron]

There's no problem -- the pages are being cached for enhanced server performance. Thus, it doesn't count every time a viewer reads a thread, because it's just using static data. It only counts replies and the original post because it has to regenerate the page under such circumstances.
(I am bolding and coloring my response because it appears most people are skipping past it and making inane posts. I mean no offense by either the text formatting or my comments herewith, just trying to save you trouble. )

[James C. Smith]

Of all the sections of the forums, the “Indie Ads” is the section I read the least. I hardly ever look at the help wanted or portfolios. And I usually skin the titles of the announcement and only read the ones from the people I know from other posts on the forums.

[TeeGee]

Well, I try to read the announcements every time I visit this boards. Good way of learning what's going on in the indie world.

[WaveRider]

There are announcements?

[Qitsune]

I read them, actually I have a small look at all the sections but the sound one because I'm in no position to hire a sound person anytime soon.

[gummikana]

I used to read them. It was actually the reason why I registered. But these days there seems to be too much clutter. Less then half of the announcements are actually games, and most of those games seem to be clones.

[PoV]

Yeah, I just glance at all the subjects now. If one catches my eye, I go in for a closer look.

[Bad Sector]

But these days there seems to be too much clutter. Less then half of the announcements are actually games, and most of those games seem to be clones.

The forum is called "News, Announcements & Feedback Requests", so it's not like that it's unexpected to see other stuff.

It would be nice if people posting there added one or two words describing what the topic is all about, such as:

[GAME FB] Please check Lalala and tell me what you think...
[GAME ANN] Lalala is released today!
[TOOL FB] Lalalengine is gonna be released soon and i need your opinions...
[TOOL ANN] Lalalengine and Lalaleditor are released, make your own games!
[SITE] What do you think about our new Chimpchomp Studios site?
[NEWS] Chimpchomp Studios announced MyChomp Games Console!

etc

[oNyx]

I think there is a problem in the way the topic views are counted anyway. I've notice the number of views is always very low but it is inaccurate.
I once noticed a thread marked with 0 views but I knew I had read it once already, so there must be some sort of problem.

views=replies+1 (new threads only)

It has been like that for a few months now. Pretty pointless really. That column could be removed altogether.

[Sol_HSA]

I only read this board called "New Posts" =)

[rioka]

If the title is interesting enough, I'll check it out. If it's a demo, feedback request or similar post, I usually don't have time to try/check them out. :|

[Promaginy]

Okay, but did every one of you collude to stop reading that forum as of Jan 2007? It just seems strange. We're talking hundreds of less views...

[soniCron]

I wondered if many of you simply didn't bother reading the replies to this thread (in fact, I wondered if most of you didn't even bother reading the original post,) and this pretty much confirms it. Please go read my response above (#2 or #3) for your answer.

[oNyx]

I wondered if many of you simply didn't bother reading the replies to this thread (in fact, I wondered if most of you didn't even bother reading the original post,) and this pretty much confirms it. Please go read my response above (#2 or #3) for your answer.

If caching would be to blame, views wouldn't equal replies+1. Instead the views would be updated to the correct value each time the cache needs to be updated (eg if someone replies).

There are several possibilities for explaining the observed behavior. (Slightly broken) caching is just one of em. For that reason I "ignored" your post and decided to point out the pattern behind the low view count.

[soniCron]

If caching would be to blame, views wouldn't equal replies+1. Instead the views would be updated to the correct value each time the cache needs to be updated (eg if someone replies).

No. It's not making the connection to the SQL server to update the number of views because it's a static page! It works like this:

1. Visitor requests to see a thread
2. vBulletin says, "Is that page cached?"
3. If so, it reads and prints the cached page back to the visitor, thus ending the transaction, and no SQL queries have been made.
4. If not, it generates the page, resulting in the number of views increasing by 1, saves the result in the cache, and then serves the cached page to the visitor.

Thus, you get the exact number of times the page had to be updated and re-cached showing up as the number of views, or replies + original post.

And, no, it would not be a trivial task to simply remove the Views column.

[oNyx]

[...]
And, no, it would not be a trivial task to simply remove the Views column.

It is. If you use some fancy css3 feature called nth-child, which isn't supported yet by FF or Opera.

Apart from that... removing columns was pretty easy with older vBulletin versions. I'm not familiar with this one, but it should be still pretty easy to do.

[Grey Alien]

yeah I'd wondered about the low view counts too. Thanks for the big red text sonicron.

[Mike Boeh]

Something is screwed up, I will look into it at some point I may just remove that column completely.

Indiegamer is always getting more and more busy. It's common now to have 300 people online at once....

[wibble]

LOL - I had thought the forums were dying since I tend to quickly scan the view count.

[RinkuHero]

Why are so many types of posts focused in that one subforum? Anyone else think it'd make more sense to have a subforum for feedback for works in progress, another for news announcements, and another for game release announcements that are not seeking feedback, instead of using one forum for all three? It makes it seem cluttered to me, even with those tags in the topics.

[Bad Sector]

Anyone else think it'd make more sense to have a subforum for feedback for works in progress, another for news announcements, and another for game release announcements that are not seeking feedback, instead of using one forum for all three?

There are made only a few posts there each week. The volume of new posts isn't high enough to justify this kind of breakage.

Even if a break has to be made, it would make more sense to make two forums instead of three: one for News and Announcements and one for Feedback requests.

But then again i think currently it's pretty ok for the volume this forum has.

[James C. Smith]

Or how about one for actual games developed by a member of the fourm, and another for all the other junk people announce/request feedback for/post news about.

[Qitsune]

While I had figured out that there was something not entirely accurate about the view counts (to say the least,) I'm still wondering how there can be some many visitors and so little posting, it seems this forum attracts an unseemly number of lurkers, I have been here for a short time but already I see some regulars emerging with great topics and advice and it seems some users account for a very large proportion of posts. Not that useless posts just to take up space are desirable.