Total page view count

greg posted this at 16:48 — 25th June 2008.

Joined: Nov 2005

I store a total for how many times a members profile has been viewed by adding 1 to the total number in the DB on page load.

But want to somehow limit the amount of times a person viewing will add 1 to the total profile views.
Obviously without storing somehow when a person has viewed the profile, clicking page refresh will add one more view.
The profiles are also available to non-members, so tracking them with member data is not possible.

I guess it wont ever be possible to make a fool proof system where each person will only add 1 view to the total, but what's the best way to get a decent system?

I don't want to store IP's or other data in the DB, the profiles are already quite code heavy.
So I thought about Cookies. But the site could have thousands of profiles, and I "presume" storing a potential of hundreds of cookies on a persons PC just for checking if they have viewed a profile or not is a bit over the top.

I tried to add an array to a cookie, which I can easily check with in_array for the profile they are viewing, if no add 1 page view. But I can't seem to get a cookie to store an array as an array. Only a single cookie for each value in the array, which is back to hundreds of cookies.

Cheers

pr0gr4mm3r posted this at 17:30 — 25th June 2008.

He has: 1,502 posts

Joined: Sep 2006

Doing it by IP address is probably a bad idea because if a profile gets hit several times by a large network (different users), it will only count as one. Same for a popular proxy.

The cookie method isn't fool proof either because someone can just clear cookies to increase their page's count, but I think it is the best option.

I would create a PHP array with the profile IDs as the keys, so when a page is viewed, run something like this:

<?php
$viewed_profiles[$profile_id] = true;
?>

Then to see if the page was view before, just test if that index exists.

<?php
if (isset($viewed_profiles[$profile_id]))
{
// profile was viewed before
}
else
{
// profile was not viewed before
}
?>

If you are having trouble storing arrays in cookies, I would just serialize it first. At the end of your script, do something like this:

<?php
$viewed_profiles = serialize($viewed_profiles);
setcookie('viewed_profiles', $viewed_profiles);
?>

Then, at the top of the page, run something like this to retrieve it:

<?php
if (isset($_COOKIE['viewed_profiles']))
{
$viewed_profiles = unserialize($_COOKIE['viewed_profiles']);
}
else
{
$viewed_profiles = array();
}
?>