Yep. And if a post/thread gets reported to mods, lots of us will look at it, plus then it sometimes gets discussed amongst ourselves which means a lot of other mods will look at it, and site admin too - could be as many as 50 views just from that one reported post. And then we'll often follow the thread in question to check each time something new is posted in it, to make sure the same issue isn't happening again. So could be hundreds of views in total, just from mods who aren't remotely interested in the thread but are just following up on one little report.

Views = Seahorse babies

Having been recently deleting old emails from Mod days, I know only too well that some posts got reported many many times - especially in threads like this! And back in the day the Aus forum sometimes had 7 Mods, plus 4/5 Supermods, none of whom would know that the 20 reports in their inbox were all for the same post where someone was touting his own website, having already been told to stop twice before in the same week........A thread could go from zero to over 1000 in less than an hour - if anyone could be bothered to look at meaningless figures. We didn't have time, we were too busy reprimanding people for causing us to have full inboxes, again!
Ah I almost miss the good old days........

Oh yes! Have to confess I've never looked at the thread stats after it's been reported to see how that compares to a 'normal' thread, but zero to over 1000 in an hour really wouldn't surprise me.

You sure you don't miss it too much and want to come back?!

Sounds like a job for AI!

We're suddenly getting lots of AI spammers now too, ridiculously wordy posts without much point to them, and they keep posting until we spot them and get rid. Really annoying and it'll only increase I think.

Set a thief to catch a thief!

I am surprised about the huge promotion of ChatGPT and its threat to jobs. A lot of what it says is just banal and very easy to spot. It is not ready to take over the world yet.

And that's exactly why they're easy to spot at the moment - daft wordy posts without any real purpose to them, almost like they've just copied and pasted from Wikipedia. I'm sure they'll get more clever as time goes by though…...

Ahhh, well done. You anticipated my next question, and answered it. Thank you again! The question was to have been, "If robots' visits can't in any way be distinguished from humans', then what is the point or purpose of reporting the number of visits? To which the answer is, "probably none". I agree. (The only point or purpose I can even imagine is "to please the advertisers", and that is way too naughty to consider!)

The only human visits that we can be certain of are the posts. So wouldn't the number of posts be enough to publish? Of the 1,868,170 "views" reported for the thread "What made you smile today?" in the Lounge Forum - for instance - only 30,240 visits can be verified, during the thread's 13.5 years of existence. Well, really!! As a former professional auditor, I would need to see some evidence of other human visits, and (as we agree) there is none available. We are reduced to what in my neck of the woods is called a Wild-Ass Guess to enlarge the figure, and WAGs are rather frowned upon in my profession, and probably yours too, CO. What do you reckon?

I reckon you're taking this waaaaay too seriously in all honesty. Why does it even matter? The advertisers won't need thread views, as they're irrelevant to them, they won't show individual views v returning views etc - they'll just use site statistics via analytics which would be much more reliable.

Very tempting actually...,..usual terms, cash in a plain brown envelope........

To whom?
In relation to what, exactly?
. Well that, at least, is pretty much always true, but who's provoking who with what is always subjective, IMHO

.

The transliteration of oral-tradition languages often has novel (to modern English) representation of glottal stops. Per Wikipedia, "the glottal stop or glottal plosive is a type of consonantal sound used in many spoken languages, produced by obstructing airflow in the vocal tract or, more precisely, the glottis."

Wikipedia goes on: "Some Canadian indigenous languages, especially some of the Salishan languages, have adopted the IPA letter ⟨ʔ⟩ into their orthographies. In some of them, it occurs as a casing pair, ⟨Ɂ⟩ and ⟨ɂ⟩.[6] The digit ⟨7⟩ or a question mark is sometimes substituted for ⟨ʔ⟩, and is preferred in languages such as Squamish."

Oh, and in case you thought that "glottal stops" were foreign to the British Isles...
"In English, the glottal stop occurs as an open juncture (for example, between the vowel sounds in uh-oh!,[9]) and allophonically in t-glottalization. In British English, the glottal stop is most familiar in the Cockney pronunciation of "butter" as "bu'er". Geordie English often uses glottal stops for t, k, and p, and has a unique form of glottalization."

"It occurs phonetically in nearly all dialects of English, as an allophone of /t/ in the syllable coda. Speakers of Cockney, Scottish English and several other British dialects also pronounce an intervocalic /t/ between vowels as in city. In Received Pronunciation, a glottal stop is inserted before a tautosyllabic voiceless stop: stoʼp, thaʼt, knoʼck, waʼtch, also leaʼp, soaʼk, helʼp, pinʼch"

It seems you were pandering to those unaware of the richness of language-pronunciation tradition even within English, let alone within other languages, Gordon. Does that make you "woke", then? ;-)