Opentracker.net forum

[szelleke]

Hi!

I need help with something please and am totally IT illiterate.

I am a member of a discussion forum that is powered by phpbb.
In the forum the number of views per topic/thread is recorded.
However, I feel it is not a fair representation/ true refelction because I know
from my own experience I can increase the number of views simply by clicking repeatedly
on a give topic myself. By clicking on and opening a thread the number of views increases regardless of who is doing the clicking. The forum is doing an audience survey and I would like to suggest a way this be controlled. Is there such a way to stop forum participants from "bigging up" the number of views on their respective threads??? Thanks.

My second quesiton is about decreasing number of views on a thread. Yes, I know, it sounds weird but I see it happening in this forum. So I wonder, Is it possible for a webmaster or moderator or hacker to puase the numbers on a particular selected thread or take away from the number of views?? Please HELP!!

Finally, although a different subject, I wanted to suggest that the forum contols multiple names being used by individuals. How can a public forum stop its individuals who post or participate in forum discussion using many alias's.?

I hope I am clear and thanks for the help.

Szelleke

[otsupport]

Hello Szelleke,

Interesting questions. We can offer a few of our experiences with this forum, although we are not experts on the subject, as we only moderate this forum.

For starters, the number of views on a topic/thread can increase dramatically, in our experience, due to automated robotic traffic. In other words, search engine spiders / bots. The other source of traffic may be scripts looking for places to post spam and/or opportunities to hack in.

We do not have experience with reducing the number of views. Presumably a forum moderator would re-post a topic or thread if the goal was to reset the number of views.

Managing the users of a forum, the number of users, aliases, etc, is a very labor-intensive process. The controls, in this system, for example, allow us to ban ip addresses and censor language we do not want to see here. That's the extent of the automated controls.


If you are really interested to research these topics, we recommend that you surf to the phpBB forums, where you will find thousands and thousands of postings on very specific aspects of these questions and subjects; http://www.phpbb.com/community/?sid=f34f65038d94b26e4125612a093f53c6

[szelleke]

Hi OT Support!
What Excellent help you give!!
Shared experience was insightful and the website you signposted me to
solved all my problems.
Much Obliged.
Thank you very much.