how to implement number of views of a particular page

Question

So basically I want to implement the same functionality as StackOverflow's:

viewed 59344 times

So here is some background information:

1. I want to count only unique visits. The assumption that registered users will read the article many times (it is evolving)
2. I use MongoDB as a store
3. I would like it to be close to real-time
4. My system will have a registration, but I want to count the views of anonymous users as well

I understand that the best way to count unique visits is through registration, but the thing is that a big chunk of users will be just passive readers who do not need to create an account to read the information from the application. As far as I understand, the most convenient way is to save the IP address of every user, who reads the post. I also understand that IP addresses will not provide uniqueness (some different users will have the same IP, because they are behind the same ISP and one user can have different IPs, by using proxies, tor, etc)

The use of Mongo is not absolutely essential, just the thing is that everything is written in Mongo right now, so I will switch only if it will be much faster/convenient.

Answer 1

Background

Are you certain you need to track "unique" views?

I actually wouldn't expect popular sites to try to keep the view counts unique - bigger is better and re-visits for new comments are still additional "views" in the the sense of showing new content/comments/ads. There are other possible subtleties to "correctness" that may or may not be important for your use case, such as excluding crawlers or your own company's users/IPs.

Instead of spending time tracking unique views (which isn't overly meaningful), I would look at counting unique user interactions such as voting/liking/commenting on the page. You can then determine "popularity" of a page with some formula based on those metrics. There is an interesting example of this approach in the Radioactivity module for Drupal, where a "hotness" metric is calculated based on activity based on recency of user interactions.

Approaches to consider

1) For a simple view counter in MongoDB, I would just use $inc to bump up the view count when the page is loaded. You can exclude logging users by role as needed (for example admin users).

2) For a more accurate view counter I would pass off the problem to a web analytics platform (which you should be using with your site for more detailed analysis anyway). For example, you can use Google Analytics API or an open source application like Piwik. Web analytics systems already have solutions in place for determining unique users/views, and the API calls for these can be asynchronous via JavaScript.

3) If implementing your own unique view tracking a definite requirement, I would use a separate collection for tracking views and upsert based on your uniqueness criteria (unique view per user,article pair for registered users or session_id,article pair for anon users). I would combine this with approach #1 (incrementing a view counter for the article views) by incrementing a counter of article views if the upsert results in an insert.