Plugin to track which users view posts

Owly

Hi all,
Is there a plugin which allows me to see which users have viewed posts? I want to know who has read certain posts and when. Thx.

hgtonight

Welcome to the community!

That could be a fun plugin for a small community. Load up the watch data for the whole discussion and output their avatar where they have read up to. Something like in google hangouts.

I don't think there is a plugin like that currently available.

peregrine

no. and just because they clicked on it

doesn't mean they read it.

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e.g. when posting a discussion it says

Please include the version number of Vanilla you are using for troubleshooting help. To file a bug report, please instead post details and steps to reproduce on our GitHub project. For addon-specific questions, go to its addon page and click the "Ask A Question" link.

obviously it appeared. but from the looks of a lot of posts - not many people have read it.

so you cannot be sure if they are really reading it.

you might be able to use spoof user type of plugin to see if it appears as new.

it also seems like alot of overkill, unless you have a specific reason for doing so.

you could trigger on an event and write a log of username to a file along with comment or discussion id if you wanted.

peregrine

@Owly‌ here is an interim plugin until @hgtonight writes his new plugin

here's a plugin that logs the views

after plugin is installed then you click on http://yourdomanname/forumfolder/uploads/spreadsheet.csv

and if you have spreadsheet software on your computer.

you will see

I put a header in for you to see what the columns are, and added some typos in the header by mistake.
I didn't put the header in the plugin, you could easily insert it.

line 24 $logfile = "uploads/spreadsheet.csv";

you can give the name something more obscure and then other people will be less likely to be able to view it.

the file could get huge if you have alot of logged in users clicking on discussions.

extract the WhoViewed plugin and place in your plugin folder.

if you leave it at uploads you don't have to change permissions.

vrijvlinder

You should have named it Snoopy....

vrijvlinder

peregrine

@vrijvlinder said:
You should have named it Snoopy....

I should have. or "The Dude" with an icon of Jeff Bridges. I don't like the idea, just as I immensely dislike those add-ons that show what city and country a user of users who viewed a web site.

I find the city country panel viewer of people who visit web sites even more of an outrage, since it shows it to the public at large whether a viewer from a specific city viewed site as well as date and time. If I see that on a website - I ABSOLUTELY never go back again. Just too intrusive for me.

This plugin could be useful if you have a small private forum (i.e. not public) and you want to ascertain the remotest possiblility somebody read (clicked) the discussion. It's all there anyway in the apache logs, this is just easier to distill. It only shows logged in users, and might be helpful for some student-teacher site.
E.g. - Is there a remote possibility did you see the homework assignment or did you clcik on the discussion after the answer was displayed. And you can click columns on spreadsheet to sort.

Tracking ip's would be more snoopy (albeit it's in the apache logs). And who knows if the cat walked on the keyboard and clicked a discussion while you were away from the computer getting a snack.

So, its pretty unreliable anyway as to who read (did they read it or just click), and if its public, maybe they read it and didn't log in.

I think this is a one off plugin so I didn't add it to the add-ons.

but you could also do as hgtonight says with out a whole lot of work (for hg that is) to display icons like the reactions except it is the avatar on the last read comment for all users. same basic programming, except instead of clicking reaction, it just reads the data from the viewed click comment that is stored.

the other thing you could do, is leave the date time off of it, and then run it though unique periodically.

http://www.computerhope.com/unix/uuniq.htm

rbrahmson

@peregrine said:
This plugin could be useful if you have a small private forum (i.e. not public) and you want to ascertain the remotest possibility somebody read (clicked) the discussion. It's all there anyway in the apache logs, this is just easier to distill. It only shows logged in users, and might be helpful for some student-teacher site.

I agree with @peregrine and he hit it on the nail -- I run a small private forum and we have a subset of discussions (in a specific category) where we put training videos (one per discussion). We'd like to track who opened these discussions, so that a moderator could remind few users who missed some training videos. We acknowledge that it is not proof positive that they actually watched the videos.

So if there was a way to show authorized users (moderator role for example) to see who saw discussions then we'd know who didn't, and that would do the trick.

So yes, if there was such a plugin we'd have used it.

R_J

For what you are trying to achieve, that plugin would be near to useless - although easy to implement. If you only need the people who viewed the discussion and not specific comments, you can simply show the users from GDN_UserDiscussion.

You already mentioned that opening a discussion doesn't mean a user view the video contained. That is one reason why something like that shouldn't be done this way.

Moreover: looking at a list of users who did something in order to know who did not, is a tedious work...

If you want to make sure some users did something, make them click [Task Fulfilled!] or something like that. Creating a plugin like that shouldn't be too hard...