WTF? · 10:37pm Oct 9th, 2014
Okay, so I just noticed that the number of views Pandelirium has received apparently spiked while I wasn't looking -- it's now the third most-viewed story in the Petriculture Cycle, despite being the last one. At first I figured that some of my readers decided to skip to the end, but when I looked at the total views for the first chapter (Chapter 10)* was still between 5,000 and 6,000, just where I remembered it being. It was only after going through each chapter that I realized that all of the new-found attention is focused squarely on Chapter 3, and I am extremely confused. Don't get me wrong, I love Chapter 3, and I'm very proud of it, but it has almost twice as many views as the story's initial chapter, and three times the views of the chapters that come before and after it.
You'd think that there'd be something in the comments section that would explain this spike, but there haven't been any changes at all since I last remember. Clicking on the statistics tab shows nothing either, so if somebody influential in the brony community linked to that chapter, it wasn't from outside of FimFiction.net, but if it was on FimFiction, I'd think one of my readers would have let me know...
Seriously, does anyone have any idea what's going on here?
*To those of you who haven't read the story yet, Pandelirium's chapters are numbered in reverse order.
Numbers are weird since the update, I have 3,260 unread chapters that don't exist.
All I can say is that over the past four days, I just finished reading the whole cycle. Loved it by the way.
Make sense? Now were is the fun in that?
Can't really say why that one chapter would be higher... Personally, I've gone back to read Inscape a couple of times, which inevitably includes continuing on to Avocation, so that's where I'm putting my views.
As for my own story... my high water mark is, of course, chapter 4, which is when I got featured on EQD and then disappeared for eight months, so... not much help there.
At this point, I'm fairly convinced that anything weird is either a bug from the update, or a deliberate change in features from the update.
There is the chance a link to that chapter was posted somewhere with good traffic and what you are seeing is the result.
2521520
Yeah, I had to move my stories into new shelves and delete the default ones to get rid of the phantoms.
2521972 ... But, but, but I just got all my shelves in the order I want them
... sigh I'll give them a week to fix it themselves before I go though all that work again so that I have everything in the order I want.
You realize, of course, that linking Chapter 3 in your post is definitely going to further skew the statistics?
I wouldn't be surprised if something like that (someone linking chapter three in some post) was the cause in the first place.
2522012 This might be the same issue from a few weeks ago. Why don't you see if running knighty's hotfix script still works after the site changes?
Seems appropriate that, out of all of your stories, the confusion is on Pandelirium.
You ain't the only one; one of my stories spiked to 37,700 views. That is not a typo; the population of a small town apparently looked at a story about Luna in Unreal Tournament.
Or, the system's still wonky and all the bugs haven't been worked out.
But it really gives you a "wat" moment, doesn't it?