I assume a lot of this time was just me having the tab opened whilst doing other things.
If the read time is 100% accurate, I’ve more spent more time on the forums than all of my games on the Epic Games store combined, which doesn’t seem realistic. Even if it’s off by 50%, I have still spent an unhealthy amount of time in this hellhole.
what about steam?
No, more steam than forums.
hmm same here
I know this is explained somewhere out there and I’m pretty sure I’ve seen it before, but I couldn’t find that explanation. So instead, I spend the past week obsessively looking through the discourse source code because I was curious as well, and now have the answer.
On screen time is tracked separately for each post; every “tick”, by default every second, time since last tick is added to the posts “timing” value. This info is periodically flushed and the value is added to the posts “total timing”, which is capped by default at 6 minutes. If you don’t scroll at least once per 3 minutes though, the tracking is paused. The “total timings” are summed up to make your “read time”, which makes it decently accurate. Long posts have their read time capped to 6 minutes, but short posts get their time extended by being tracked just for being on screen among other short posts, which should average out the inaccuracies somewhat nicely.
You can read the same post multiple times by scrolling up and down the topic, up to the cap, but once you reach it you would have to reload the page to have the timing tracked again for that post. You can’t idle and gain read time, since there is the no-scroll time cap and being in a category page or on the home page doesn’t add read time since tracking only starts when you enter a topic.
Interesting, thank you for sharing that lovely bit of information.
You are most welcome.