About views on scriptbin

Views on scriptbin are tallied differently than on other sites. Views started being tallied in early July 2022.

A view is only recorded once in a 7 day period for a subject. A subject is the logged-in user, or if no user is logged in, the IP address. If you visit a script and then return 6 days later, a second view will not be recorded. If you return 7 days and a second later, a second view will be recorded.

Views are only visible when views have been recorded from 12 or more subjects.

Views are only visible to the writer of the script. You can't see other writer's script's views.

A view is not recorded when the writer of a script views the script themselves.

Views are only recorded when a script is publicly listed, not password protected and not hidden. (The writer's profile does not need to be publicly listed.)

Views are not recorded when it appears that a bot is fetching the page. There are many bots, but as an example, Googlebot or other bots "crawling the web" often hit scriptbin when updating the index of search engines.

Wait, so how do subjects work? Does that mean IP addresses of script views are recorded in plain text into the database?

The subject is recorded in the database as the "hash" of the script's ID and either the logged-in username or the IP address. What hash means here is that the information will look like 872bd5fe318 or 372ad82e19f, with no trace of the username or the IP address, and without being able to go backwards. It will also be different per script.

Why is there a minimum limit for views? Why do scripts need to be publicly listed?

If scriptbin simply tallied views one by one as the page was loaded, creating a script and sending the link to someone, you could see if the link had been opened. Subjects and other measures are used to ensure that the script has received some public exposure before any count is shown. That said, there is no way to completely guard against this without requiring more invasive procedures.

If you see "not yet listed for this script", there have not yet been views recorded from 12 or more subjects.

Why are all views within a 7 day period for the same subject coalesced into one view? Why do I not see the full view count? Why do I not see other writers' view count?

Aside from avoiding the issue mentioned above, views are meant as a relative measurement for your own use. Many bad things have come out of platforms pushing people to make a particular number go higher. The goal of the view counts as implemented on scriptbin is to extract useful information while maintaining personal privacy for both writers and readers and avoiding addictive properties and "dick measuring" as much as possible.

Is this the same system powering the Bingo feature, where the most popular scripts are excluded?

No, that uses a different list of views. Those views do not include any subject information (username or IP address) at all; they are not coalesced because it is not possible without the subject information and also because it is necessary to make the feature work well, but they will not be presented to the writer or to anyone. A script being shown on Bingo only means that it is not currently one of the absolute most popular scripts on the site; the vast majority of scripts fall into this category at any given time and there is no way to get an exhaustive list.