An update to Photo Stats - bye bye bots 👋

All members see the view count of their photos on each photo page, Ace Members also see a historical chart of their views over the last 30 days.

Over the last few years we've frequently received spikes in this data when an unknown "bot" or search engine crawler loads every photo in your album and creates these annoying blips in the data.

A few months ago I suggested I could change the logic on the stats so that only real, human logged-in members would count towards your "views" - and most people were on-board with that change.

Today I have implemented this change in the view count logic as I know it frustrates many members and I've finally had enough of chasing these bots down when a new one seems to be invented every few days.

Hopefully this will completely eliminate spikes from occurring in the data from now on.

What this means for members is that you'll likely see a drop in the number of views your photos receive because it will no longer count the bots (good) but it will also exclude any genuine not-logged-in people who look at your photos (for example if you share them on Facebook and someone clicks and views it on our website, that view will not be counted).

I hope everyone is accepting of this change, and those that aren't understand why I've made this choice.

Happy photographing!