Hiya, lovely peeps!

Please donʼt make fun of me for perhaps asking a question with an obvious answer, but itʼs just that Iʼm genuinely confused.

Who reads the stories that have not yet been submitted?

Iʼm currently the second chapter of What a Strange New World, and the views keep going up, despite the chapter having not yet been uploaded. So, whoʼs reading it?

Again, please donʼt make fun of me.

7295202
Unless I am wrong nobody can read your unpublished stories. Not unless you give them a link and permission.

But are you maybe talking about a published story but an unpublished chapter? Then I think someone is just reading the published part of the story, not the chapter you haven't published yet.

7295202
I think it counts your views, so every time you open it a new view is added

7295202

From what I saw, if a chapter is published, then reading it or just working on it will make the story's view count go up even if the story's still unsubmitted.

For this reason, I always wait to publish a chapter (or the chapter for one-shots) until it's time to submit the story.

7295202 I think the views reset to 0 when you publish it.

7295204 7295206 7295208 7295210

Here.

The story has 236 views and 8 upvotes. And yet, this specific chapter has a different number of views, despite not being available to the public. And yet, I did not send anyone my unsubmitted password.

7295211

Did you open the chapter 20 times? If so, it's counting that as the views. If you didn't, then I got no idea.

I also know that each chapter should have a different number of views, which what you showed counts how many times that chapter was opened.

What chapter is that screenshot from? Chapter 2 or beyond?

I'll also note that my first comment was going by the story's views, not the views each chapter has.

7295214
Chapter 2.

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You know, I never really thought about it that way. I always assumed someone was having access to my work-in-progress. I guess thatʼs the answer then. Right?

7295218

It seems like it.

Now, if you create a chapter and only open it a few times, then you come back later on and see it has 15, 20, or more views, then something might be wrong and I'd suggest changing your password, just in case.

7295225
Okay, cool. Thanks a lot for the advice and info.

7295229

No problem!

7295202

Likely a moderator checking your story before submission. A little while ago, I had a live reader count of three on one of my fics when I was still putting up the chapter and formatted it. I always have the new chapter open in two different tabs when I do that, one tab to format the chapter in, the other tab to refresh the chapter and see if the formatting looks correct. I always have a live reader count of two because of that, but one time it showed three even though I had only opened the chapter twice.
This never happened again, so I rule out that someone knows my password. It would definitely happen more often if that were the case and someone would use that to get an early peek at my fics, so I can figure that a moderator with the ability to see unpublished fics dropped by for some reason.