Who are all them lurkers?

[Libertad]

So a thing I noticed about the IMHO subforum I notice that most threads easily gain several hundred views in a matter of days, while some of the larger threads can easily break a thousand. Although the title's clickbaity, my OSSR of the Reign of Men (John Wick's Libertarian Fantasy Utopia) got 10k+ views in the course of its history. Most of that was political slapfighting with one libertarian/alt-right poster, but it was still am amount even most of my threads at bigger sites like RPGnet have trouble breaking.

But compare these to the forum regulars, who tend to be a core stable of long-time members.

Are Den views disproportionately from a lot of lurkers? Some obsessively-clicking posters? A mixture?

[Foxwarrior]

RPGnet view counts exclude some bots maybe? The web is full of spiders.

[Iduno]

Comparing to other forums with similar structure, 20x the number of views as posts isn't unreasonable.

It's possible that RPGnet posters need to have an opinion on everything and post on every thread they read?

Plus, you probably get a slight increase from people viewing a thread, then logging in and viewing it again to post. We'd be at 1 in 19-ish views ends in a post that way, which is still a lot, but not entirely unreasonable. I'd guess 1 in 10 is in line with the amount people read vs read then post.

[Libertad]

Actually I just recalled that back before the XenForo upgrade RPGnet (and Giant in the Playground) counted only unique pageviews. Meaning that once someone from an IP address views a topic it forever counts as 1 rather than increasing by 1 with each click from that same address. I don't know if RPGnet still has that function but even with this schematic they rated high.

I can tell that TGDMB does total views, but even then it has a high viewership in comparison to its userbase when looking at sites like EN World.

[Avoraciopoctules]

I personally lurk way more than I post. There are threads I may check 5-6 times in a day without posting in, if there's something interesting going on. It's easy to skim through forums while waiting for load times, taking a lunch break, etc. It's also easier to read than post if you are using a tablet or phone to access a forum.

[Darth Rabbitt]

I'm in the same boat as Av.

[czernebog]

As in life, so online: I lurk at the community's periphery. No clue how many of us there are. I would be very surprised if there were enough of us to account for tens of thousands of views, though.