Add view count to How-to and Research

Component infos

Description

We want to have a view count on our How-to and Research pages.

Page related

Research and How-to pages.

Build suggestion

• It will be build using the aggregations.
• Ideally there is some sort of logic that only counts one visit per hour. (To prevent it being mis-used by refreshing 200 times in a row)
• Should be released for beta-testers first. So we can test it

Mockup

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[chrismclarke]

@ryanwbass Thanks for taking this on. There might be a bit of added challenge with this one with the best place to actually store this information. The natural place to think would be the howto itself, adding a viewCount property and just increasing by 1 any time the howto page is loaded except this will mean howto docs are constantly updated and the entire doc will need to be synced across all users many times (which is a costly set of db read operations)

There’s also the not-unlikely scenario that a howto could be viewed by multiple users at similar times, meaning that any client-side updates could easily become out of sync (e.g. two users both increment the count from 2->3 before having the chance to sync the others’ update).

So I think I’d recommend a few things:

1. Use a new collection for tracking raw stats. E.g. add a howto_stats or similar endpoint to shared\db.ts that will hold the viewCount for each doc.

2. Feel free to make a first pass implementing everything with client-side UI and logic (e.g. the button, the logic to increment the viewcount and limit spamming etc.). I wouldn’t worry to much about being clever with the spamming code, if someone is determined they will always find a way around so I expect something like a localstorage entry should be fine to at least prevent repeated refresh. If we ever want more accurate stats we can use google analytics that tracks things like IPs for anti-spam

3. Consider moving the increment code to a firebase function which can use special field-value increment functions instead of relying on manual calculation (I can help with this)

4. Consider adding an aggregation to collate all viewcount stats into a single doc for easier consumption in the frontend. I can help with this (we have a pending pr to make backend dev a bit easier using docker emulators instead of firebase server)

[AlfonsoGhislieri]

Perfect, sounds good to me 😊