While I definitely see Roger's point, as I responded to his email, view counters are brutal on overall performance. Every time somebody hits a page it has to go update records to track those views. Databases are typically optimized either for read access where the number of reads swamp the number of writes, or for write access where you need to do lots of updates but very few queries. It's very difficult to make a database do both well without some serious design and serious iron backing it up. NGDF, and most internet sites, are the former - lots of reads, few writes. Plus, since the data is fairly static, caching works very well and we can usually skip the database query entirely. If you have view counters on, the cache goes to hell and you have to do the DB query every single time. Pretty much every guide to setting up Phorum (the BB software that runs NGDF) will tell you that view counters are one of your top performance gremlins.
Don and I had view counters on at several points in the past, and had to disable them because they were just killing performance as our number of users and visitors continued to grow. That was several years back, and our page views have skyrocketed since then.
I told Roger he's more than welcome to post links if he wants to send visitors to his own site so that he has metrics on the number of views. I appreciate his posts and enjoy looking at them, as do most of us, and I certainly don't want anyone to be of the opinion that I'm discouraging his posts. I Unfortunately his request just isn't one I can accommodate right now, because at the moment it's a trade-off, and I'm prioritizing good overall performance over view counters. Until such point that NGDF moves onto bigger hardware (and that's not going to happen until my life is a little less under water, maybe in a year or so), enabling them just isn't an option.
