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View tally reset, cause and future solutions

Hi all,

Last night one of our web servers suffered a hardware failure and had to be removed from the group of public-facing machines. Because of the way listing view tally data is currently stored, part of the listing tally data has been lost. This means that some ( roughly 1/10 of all ) listings have had their view tally data reset to 0.

The view tally data on Etsy is stored in a different and more temporary manner than any of the other data on the site. This is because view tally data is very difficult to store quickly ( it is updated thousands of times every second ) and because it is considered to be nonessential when compared to things like sales records, conversations, listings, user profiles, billing information, etc.

"Nonessential" doesn't mean "not important", however -- we know very well how sellers feel about their view tally information and we want to make this information as reliable as possible. We plan to begin developing a system that will store view tally data permanently and reliably, and we'd like to be able to tie it into tracking other information that sellers have been asking for, such as referrer information. This may take a little while, as much of the focus of the team is currently placed on scaling the site to handle the ever-growing traffic we've been experiencing.

We apologize for the frustrations caused by the existing view tally system. We know that it's very hard to run a shop online without reliable statistics. We’re anxious to provide you with better and more reliable statistics, and we’ll be getting them to you as soon as possible.

Thank you for your patience!

Please address all comments and questions to the associated forum thread.

Tags bugs, listings, view counts
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RevolvingDork

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