Posted 11/20/2023 9:20 AM (GMT -5)
(I believe I have this right, but not being a computer person, I invite you tech guys to step in and correct me if I'm wrong in what I say below. But I think I'm right).
Almost daily we have great conversations here on this forum, on threads covering a vast array of topics, normally about some aspect of PCa, and sometimes on other subjects, but almost always informative and helpful.
And since the tone is usually informal and of a face-to-face nature, we may tend to slip into a casual feeling that we are talking only among ourselves, and that's how far our conversations are going.
And that may be true for much of the time, and reflected in the "Views" count, on the right side of the forum index screen, listing currently active threads by title.
Views: the number of times someone has accessed the thread, and presumably read through it.
For example, I may see the current thread "Weird situation here" and note that so far it has 141 Views listed to its right (as of today, Nov. 20). "That's fine," I might think to myself, "I guess maybe 141 of us, including return-views, here have viewed this thread, and read our ongoing discussions on it."
But then a neighboring thread catches my eye, "Final chapter in the Labcorp <0.006 vs <0.014 saga" with 1388 Views. "But where did all those 1388 Views come from?" I might wonder. "Maybe only around 50 or so of us here have viewed this thread. And even if return-views by us here of active threads run up the Views totals more over time, the Views total is still quite large. So just who are all those other viewers?"
Well, simply, they are the many people from outside HWPC, who likely are even unfamiliar with HWPC, but who were using their own browsers for information on PSA values, found "Final chapter in the Labcorp <0.006 vs <0.014 saga" after searching the web using their own browsers, and then came here to view our thread, and were thus counted as a View on our forum's index screen.
So for the above-mentioned thread "Final chapter in the Labcorp <0.006 vs <0.014 saga", with its 1388 Views, that means around, say, 1300 people out there (excluding, say, 50+ that may represent us) from somewhere else on the web came here, read, and hopefully benefited from reading our thread "Final chapter in the Labcorp <0.006 vs <0.014 saga."
And what about all those threads we have had here that garnered even more Views, possibly even thousands more?
Have that many people been coming here from the outside, and perhaps benefited from what we have had to say?
Have we in our discussions here over time contributed to answers to questions that possibly thousands were asking about PCa, and they came here and got their answers from us?
The Internet is this enormous body of millions of searchers, looking for information, including answers to their questions about PCa.
If so, then I for one find it rather satisfying, as well as even a little humbling, that we may have already helped a good many such people searching for answers, people we'll never know, people perhaps just recently diagnosed, but who found our threads here, and were able to take away for themselves something useful from them.
Take another look at our forum index screen, and at the listed threads there, and note how many of them have had hundreds and hundreds, some even thousands, of Views!
Maybe our threads and their discussions here actually have helped that many people!
Doesn't that make for a good feeling?