Has anyone else had their story metrics break on SH?

[JWWolfStar]

Hi,

So I released my series 'The Rule of the Chain' a few weeks ago. At first it went unseen but after I kept loading chapters it started to grow. For three weeks I was consistently getting over 600 page views and hundreds of chapter reads a day, some days it went over 1k page views.

Then something seemed to break. Chapter reads started not automatically updating and only appeared after manual refresh or doing an edit on the story. Then within a few days my page views crashed to low hundreds and then nothing. Chapter reads went from high 800s to double figures.

At the same time, every time I clicked on a chapter to see if it had updated its views it would tick up by just one, not every time but most times. Then all of the page views were being attributed to author action - this is something that shouldn't be possible anyway, there should be no way the author checking on their story increases the stats this would bring all stats into question.

I'm now stuck in this phase where I'm getting almost no new views on a story that was very recently seeming to grow in popularity. It feels like the platform has intervened in some way to hide it.

Has anyone else had similar issues and found any solution to being dead zoned like this?

NB: I don't know what or if there is any correlation between the chapter reads clicking up and author activity being counted (which should not happen in any case) and losing all visibility is.

Thanks

 

[Zinless]

Your story hasn't lost visibility, nor did the platform intervene.

But... consistently getting 600+ views while only having five registered readers isn't normal, I think. I suspect there was something wrong going on with the views counter that increased them dramatically during those three weeks you mentioned.

 

[JWWolfStar]

There's definitely an issue somewhere. It shouldn't be possible to over or under count really. My readership was 99% UK-based as well, which seemed strange that there was no international spread

 

[SouthernMaiden]

Your story hasn't lost visibility, nor did the platform intervene.

But... consistently getting 600+ views while only having five registered readers isn't normal, I think. I suspect there was something wrong going on with the views counter that increased them dramatically during those three weeks you mentioned.

This is the answer. Plus there were only a couple favourites. The ratio makes no sense. I wonder what happened...

 

[JWWolfStar]

I'm not closer to getting any answers for this and the problems still persist. The two issues of author attributed counts and a massive crash in traffic remains. I don't know how it's possible to go from 600 views a day to single figures or even zero views some days within a short space of time.

There may or may not have been over counting previously but over counting is not a known issue and it if it were it would bring the whole stats issue into question.

I'm just exhausted because something that was rewarding has become utterly inexplicable and I don't see a way forward.

 

[Ararara]

Maybe initially the extra views came from the "Latest Series" part of the homepage? Idk if the difference would be so drastic though, since many new stories are released every day, so you shouldn't stay there very long anyways.

Or the story was on some of the trending lists and fell off? I really don't know what caused it

The story doesn't appear "hidden" in any way, I can search it just fine, though getting new organic readers is always rough unless your story is already really popular (pushing it towards the top of any results / lists).

I would be surprised if the views were a bug in the system, it's been stable for a long time, but who knows. There's also always a chance 1 weird (UK-based?) reader or even a bot kept refreshing the pages hundreds of times, no idea why they'd do it though

 

[Alski]

My readership was 99% UK-based as well, which seemed strange that there was no international spread

Sounds like an external bot problem, as for the cause no clue.

 

[Eldoria]

The engagement is too crazy. The gap between views and bookmarks is too lopsided. Perhaps more views are generated by bots than organic (human) readers click.

 

[LastMinami]

There's definitely an issue somewhere. It shouldn't be possible to over or under count really. My readership was 99% UK-based as well, which seemed strange that there was no international spread

Is it possible to know where the readers are from? How?

 

[JWWolfStar]

Is it possible to know where the readers are from? How?

Yes

On create>edit>statistics there's a tab labelled 'insights' that tells you where your page views are from.

 

[JWWolfStar]

Maybe initially the extra views came from the "Latest Series" part of the homepage? Idk if the difference would be so drastic though, since many new stories are released every day, so you shouldn't stay there very long anyways.

Or the story was on some of the trending lists and fell off? I really don't know what caused it

The story doesn't appear "hidden" in any way, I can search it just fine, though getting new organic readers is always rough unless your story is already really popular (pushing it towards the top of any results / lists).

I would be surprised if the views were a bug in the system, it's been stable for a long time, but who knows. There's also always a chance 1 weird (UK-based?) reader or even a bot kept refreshing the pages hundreds of times, no idea why they'd do it though

This would make sense but I never had any visibility during latest stories and even when I was getting 1k views in a day my series never features on any list. Not rising stars. Not trending.

I'm not even sure it's still appearing on latest updates because new chapters have gone from 100-200 reads in first 24hrs to zero reads.

The one weird uk reader thing would make sense in one way but the reads were entirely in keeping with what you'd expect. A flurry during the initial release, new chapters getting more reads than old chapters.

Honestly, it's like the whole thing was designed to send me mad wondering why everything looked like real reads but there was no proof of life in interactions.