Yes, John had to remove that for some reason that I don’t remember offhand.
I may be wrong, but I think the thread view counter bogged something down.
He’s usually busy, so I don’t know if he will be able to lend insight into that.
It would be good to know just to find out what topics outside lurkers are interested in.
To abbreviate the reason, they lost out for technical reasons and I haven’t played around with it because it didn’t seem important.
The long reason: a brute force increment to the database with each view was too spammy on updates, instead I batched aggregate counts in process and updated the affected records periodically. This was performed in a single process within the load balancing software and it was beautiful. Then I switched load balancing packages and lost the ability to use this method. This was before the database was super awesome as it is now. I haven’t tested spam updates or a similar aggregate and periodic dump within our custom software on each of our four forum servers. I’ve been investigating alternatives to our Perl code base, Perl is a great language with a very rich suite of libraries for this type of job, but I want to try a new language platform. We’re also looking a bit long in the tooth these days, I don’t want a straight port but the next great leap in forum design. These agendas have kept me busy, mucking about in the existing code base doesn’t seem as productive.