That's what "viewing" means, "looking".

Bill --

I'm not sure that this is something that can be done. First of all, the forum code we are running was not developed by the World Community Grid and I am not sure if they do or do not have the source code. Beyond this, information would have to be retained somewhere to indicate who had visited a thread, either on the server hosting the forums or on a "cookie" saved on the visitor's PC. Each of these poses its own problems.

If retained on the server, the problem presented is that the scale of the World Community Grid environment requires that the forums run on multiple (I think, but am not certain that there are two) servers. This would require that there be coordination between the servers as to which members had visited. You have probably noticed some of the problems associated with this issue such as the Forum Index page not correctly identifying the most recent post in the forums and the "Who's Online" only reflecting those signed on to the same server you are viewing from.

It would seem to me that a more likely place to retain such information would be at the visitor's PC. This would require some type of mechanism such as a "cookie" in order to maintain and report the information back to the server and the World Community Grid made the decision early on in the project that cookies would not be used because of the privacy and security issues that they pose.

Out of curiosity, I checked out some of the forums that I regularly visit to see how this is handled in them. On the first two forums I visited, I viewed a thread multiple times and the visit counter incremented for each of my views, so those forums behaved in the same manner as the World Community Grid forums. The third forum that I regularly visit did not maintain a view count. The only statistic was the number of posts in each of the threads. So, by my unscientific sampling, all of the forums that I regularly participate in behave in the same manner as these forums with regard to counting views or they do not report the count.

Finally, I don't believe that Flange was trying to show hostility towards you, but rather was trying to add a touch of humor. Each of us that serves as a volunteer Community Admin brings with him or her self whatever baggage comes with being a human being, our sense of humor and our current temperment being the most notable. These are influenced in some respects by the culture around us (the Admin's do live in different countries and often what is perceived as humor does not travel well). Other times, fatigue and health issues creep in to our postings (this is often an issue with me since I do not sleep very well). Please accept this explanation and shrug off the perception that it was meant to be mean spirited.

Best regards,