Story stats

null0trooper wrote:

My impression is that Joomla designers think that text and tables are bad, but I'll leave the accessibility diatribe for another day.

null0trooper wrote:

Kristin Darken wrote:

However, the only "fuss" being raised is that the information about reader engagement authors could get to on the old site - hits and ratings - is no longer in a single place where it can easily be seen without artificially raising the hits counters, but distributed across every single story part published.

Yes... well, the article manager that allowed WhatIF authors to see hit counters without incrementing the count ALSO let them see things that they technically didn't have access level to see. Which is one reason why it was discontinued by Joomla for security concerns. Some of the same issues are why it is no longer possible for WhatIF authors to publish their own stories into the released category. I originally intended to use the extension that is implemented in the "Recent" stories menu option. That grid extension gives a really nice layout and has flexible enough features that it would be great for showing off the story catalogue... or so it seemed when I checked out the demo. And then I found that it doesn't paginate. So for 10... 20.. 30 or so stories? It's great. For a category of 600 stories? That's one really big page load. At least I still got some use of the extension. Unlike a couple others that, after purchasing them, found they wouldn't integrate properly and had to put them aside.

Solutions DO exist for the stuff being asked for. They're not cheap ($100/yr price tag for the content analytics extension that I've found that 'may' do the trick... similar price range for the multi-tag filter I've found - and there's no guarantee once we purchase either of them that they will integrate and work for us, but they 'look' like they will from feature lists and site demos). Of course, its entirely possible that 'many' extensions are going to stop being supported as the developers move on to creating updates/versions that work with Joomla 4 instead of the version we're using. The question is... is it worth 100-200 dollars to get one or both of these extensions in the hope they will work... knowing that's a yearly cost that we'll have to cover to keep things working?

Honestly? I get the concern about artificially incrementing the hit counter making things slightly less accurate... but ... that's going to happen anyway. Bots that parse the site increment it. People who load the story and don't read it all in one sitting do that. People who load the story, read it offline, then go back and click a rating... or a thank you or whatever... are adding more than one count. And then there are people who are going to use RSS or email subscriptions... and THEY aren't going to increment it at all. It's only going to be a reasonably accurate data point if it is vastly more complex than most Joomla extensions are. With IP records and/or other identity checks on independent increments. The old site wasn't free of those problems. True, the article manager made it easy to see and didn't increment it. But other things did. Those numbers weren't accurate with google analytics numbers. There's no 'simple' solution. In the meantime... just check your story by loading it. If you're worried about all the extra loads messing up the counter? Keep track of how many times you check it. Subtract those. (Side note: quickest way I can think of to see the count is to jump to your story's comment module... that's always right at the bottom of the story, so a quick scroll up will show the hit counter... instead of having to scroll through the whole story from the top).