Just curious, why would views disappear?

[photofoolery]

Just curious about this. Last night there were five views on one item and one on another. This morning they aren't showing any views, yet both were listed in the last day or two. Why would the views disappear?

[hartungcards]

Welcome to eBay.  It's similar to when a newly-listed item is showing multiple views, and when you go to the graph to see when the views were, it says "There are no views for this time period."

[a_c_green]

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@photofoolery wrote:

Just curious about this. Last night there were five views on one item and one on another. This morning they aren't showing any views, yet both were listed in the last day or two. Why would the views disappear?

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I don't see any listings of yours so I assume we're talking about someone else's listings here.

Views are counted on a 30-day sliding window. It could be that they had relisted in the last day or two, but had not been directly viewed (as opposed to just skimmed in search results) for 29 days, so once 30 days had elapsed, the oldest views (or, in this case, the only views) rolled off, and the counters returned to zero.

[photofoolery]

Thanks, listed under a different ID, but I am wondering why they show zero now when both items were listed for the first time a day or two ago, and both showed views last night.

[stuff4divas]

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@photofoolery wrote:

Just curious about this. Last night there were five views on one item and one on another. This morning they aren't showing any views, yet both were listed in the last day or two. Why would the views disappear?

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@photofoolery  if they are bot views, they'll get deleted

[photofoolery]

I guess I've never checked the graph.

The items showed views on the Listings page, as well as on the actual listing. This has probably occurred before and I've just never noticed.

[a_c_green · Accepted solution]

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@photofoolery wrote:

Thanks, listed under a different ID, but I am wondering why they show zero now when both items were listed for the first time a day or two ago, and both showed views last night.

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Oh, okay... I have seen that happen on occasion in the past, views suddenly going to zero across the board, but they would come back later. The page is assembled from calls to all kinds of database tables to get the various statistics, and if a call for data is not returned promptly, the process has a choice of either waiting around for the response to roll in, or continuing on without it. In the case of view counters, they probably have it coded to just plow ahead with all zeroes. (We're talking milliseconds for this whole decision-making process.)

I know they have stopped counting bot views of listings, although I'm not sure about the theory of counting them first and then deleting them later. I would just check those new listings every day or so and see if the view numbers come back again.

[photofoolery]

Thank you, I appreciate the reply, and that makes sense about the various database tables. I'll check to see if the views come back. As I said, I was more curious than anything else, but also when I see possible glitches like that I begin to wonder what else is going on that I might not be noticing.

I'm glad to know the bot views have stopped - I didn't realize that!

Thanks again. Have a nice weekend!

[a_c_green]

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@photofoolery wrote:

Thank you, I appreciate the reply, and that makes sense about the various database tables. I'll check to see if the views come back. As I said, I was more curious than anything else, but also when I see possible glitches like that I begin to wonder what else is going on that I might not be noticing.

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LOTS of stuff! 😄 There is a real spit-and-baling-wire approach to software maintenance on this site, partly due to its age, and the fact that later programmers cannot always decipher code written by earlier ones who are no longer around, but that's a huge topic for another day...

I should add that I don't disagree with @stuff4divas's comment about bot views getting deleted (as opposed to just not counting them in the first place). It may be easier, behind the scenes, to let the old existing code do its View counting however it likes, and then have a followup process examine each View event later, removing the ones that were not done by an interactive user.