Just what constitutes a story view?

[Bamagan]

It used to be instantaneous, and so it was easy to test. Every test you do now would be unreliable due to hours-long update time. You never know who might have accessed the story during those hours.
But yeah, I doubt they actually changed the way views are registered, as the current mechanism "promotes" traffic.

The counter in the personal 'My Stories' area updated for me within less than ten minutes when I tested just now. The public-facing ones do seem to take longer, although I had assumed it was hourly (I never bothered to time that).
*I tested on my two least-viewed stories, clicking twice on one and once on the other, and clicking through all three pages of the second instance of the one I loaded twice in the same browser session. They incremented by two and by one, updated more or less simultaneously on my page, and my IP address didn't change so that apparently has no effect on things being counted twice.

 

[AwkwardlySet]

The counter in the personal 'My Stories' area updated for me within less than ten minutes when I tested just now. The public-facing ones do seem to take longer, although I had assumed it was hourly (I never bothered to time that).
*I tested on my two least-viewed stories, clicking twice on one and once on the other, and clicking through all three pages of the second instance of the one I loaded twice in the same browser session. They incremented by two and by one, updated more or less simultaneously on my page, and my IP address didn't change so that apparently has no effect on things being counted twice.

It took much longer for the view counter to update in my Control Panel when I tested it the other day. It probably still works the same way it used to; it just doesn't update right away.

 

[MillieDynamite]

It never adds a count to my stories when I open them after I've done so once. Days or weeks later, and nothing happens. I reload my page, and reload it again with twenty minutes between, and rarely adds a count to any that have been inactive for a time. If people are still reading them, you don't know if it's yours or not. But when they haven't changed for a few days. And do this, it doesn't change.

How do you know this? My impression, although I am not certain, is the opposite: I think when one reader reopens a story he has already read that it registers as a new view.

One reason I believe this is that I've noticed that over time with high-view count stories the view to vote ratio gradually increases, which suggests to me that people may be re-reading the story but obviously not re-voting on the story, because you can't do that.

 

[alohadave]

To clarify that: what do you mean specifically by "page load"? If I'm on page 1 of a story and I click to go to page 2, that's not a page load is it?

It only counts the first page of a multi-page story. Otherwise if there was, say 20 pages, and you clicked through each page, it would show 20 views.