9
votes
Total people viewing X
Would be a nice feature to see a number of people currently viewing a topic to see where the activity is currently at on Tildes
Would be a nice feature to see a number of people currently viewing a topic to see where the activity is currently at on Tildes
There wouldn't really be a way to tell how long someone is on a page without using some kind of heuristic approach, anyway, simply due to the limitations of the technology. Unique page hits within a specific time period would be more than sufficient.
Not arguing for or against here. I just like discussing the tech itself :)
Even the old site is quite heavy on JS-based tracking now. Recently they even changed it so that it sends the tracking data to legitimate API endpoints like
/api/voteand such (it seems to pick a random one on each pageload), so that it's impossible to block their tracking with simple url-based blocking (which is what uBlock Origin and other similar privacy extensions use).Now if you want to block it you have to use something that can look at the actual data being sent so you can distinguish the tracking requests from functionality ones.
Jesus that's devious. Is tracking people that important?
To some extent, I could see a legitimate use where they combine the tracking with some sort of behavioral analysis to crack down on bots--if they don't appear to be human based on the endpoints accessed, then flag the account.
That being said, it still doesn't sit right with me and such a feature would naturally be easy to exploit for profitability purposes (likely at the expense of user privacy).
I haven't decided fully what I think of it, there could be a technical issue involved. But it sure feels like there isn't, a vast majority of users actually don't block these things. This is going out of your significantly to override the desires of your users. I guess that's what bugs me.
I wholeheartedly agree. When you start waging war with your users, it generally doesn't indicate anything positive (unless your users are objectively and unjustifiably being assholes, of course, but that doesn't really factor in here).
As long as it doesn't get big enough to really matter they won't take action. The first go to is to simply win with a better app, and their app is ok, I only can really complain about secondary things. There are good talented people developing it. The mod experience is still not good, and forget about any subreddit differentiation. Sidebar? ha ha buried with no CSS.
Even with a JS app, those movements would need to be tracked via periodic requests to the server, either through a polling model to check if the user is still on the page or through detecting page changes. Additionally, this doesn't account for noscript or people having multiple tabs open, so no matter what approach you take, there's always going to be a limit to the accuracy of your tracking.
You're correct that it's technically possible, it's just that this would be a heuristic approach only.
Oh it does track everything, every click you make and where you clicked, how much you scrolled. Open up the dev tools and see the network tab. You will see new requests being sent when all you do is move the mouse around.
Could we not just employ a "Total unique IPs since X:XX?"
Ah, gotcha
That would require keeping a log of all IP addresses that requested a specific page to compare against.
That ends up being just as bad (if not worse) as tracking a user across the site, and I'd imagine it goes against the intentions of the ~ devs.
Ah okay, that makes sense. Is there really no way to display information and not keep logs of it then?
You need some way of verifying whether a request is a unique one or not, and the only way I can think of is keeping a log of unique identifiers on the server.
I'm not sure if an anonymous identifier based on the IP/UID would be acceptable or not, and perhaps someone else knows of an alternative (This isn't really something I have had to deal with), but I don't believe there's a logless way.
Actually, there are ways of doing it without storing user details at all. Funnily enough, it's what they do at reddit. (They use it for scalability, of course.)
Essentially, it counts the hashes of the information instead of the information itself, and then doesn't even store the hashes. However, it never counts the same thing more than once. I started writing an explanation of the details of how it works, but it's all been explained much better at redis's creator's site. He starts with a pretty layman explanation, and then goes into more detail if you're interested.
Interesting, I hadn't heard of that before.
I actually looked it up, and found a more practical example that seemed to make a bit more sense.
It's definitely an interesting approach, and since i'm a hobbyist developer at best, it's not something I've ever encountered (or needed!)
Thanks :D
interesting! in what ways do you find this more valuable than other means of showing activity, like based on comments/engagement?
I know we are all for simplicity and it's quite a big change with a backend already in place but maybe a future iteration could take into consideration websockets to exchange data between backend and frontend.
That way, things like knowing how many client (anonymously) are on a topic would be quite easy and real time. I mean, the whole website would support realtime posting / loading data.
I mean, I would find more interesting a board in which messages add themselves instead of me having to refresh the page than a board in which I can see how many people are only on a topic at any given time. Because honestly, with being scattered all over the world, when you're only becomes quite irrelevant because I'll always take into consideration that a reply to something I write will come eventually in the next 24h.