Views and popularity (or “metrics”) are used to help assign a numerical value to the quality and usefulness of authors, playbooks, plays, formations, and playart on Playbook Wizard.  Rather than use subjective systems like star ratings that poll users we instead try to determine quality objectively by what users do on the site.

For example, if a lot of authors are adding a particular play to their playbooks, creating new plays from a specific formation, or using a certain playart as their default it seems reasonable to conclude that content is useful and of high quality.  By the same token, if a lot of authors are viewing a piece of content it’s logical to conclude that content is more notable than content that few authors are viewing.

So, using author behavior as a guide, valuable content like a well thought out play with accurate tags, description, and detailed player notes will be rated higher than mediocre or unfinished content.

Rated higher in what?

Views
Views represent the number of times a logged in author (someone who has joined Playbook Wizard and has their own author account) views the content. (An author viewing his or her own content is not counted.)

Popularity
Each unit of popularity represents one author that has used the content in some way.  For plays that’s adding the play to one of their playbooks, for formations it’s basing a play on the formation, and for playart that’s assigning the playart to a playbook or as their default.

For authors and playbooks the popularity calculation is a little different.  For playbooks it’s the sum of the popularity of the plays it contains and for authors it’s the sum of the popularity of all their content.

In each case popularity is a measure of how many authors have used the content not how many times it has been used.  One author using a play in ten of their playbooks counts the same as if they had used it in only one.

Viewing Metrics
Metrics are shown in the author block as orange and brown bars:

The orange bar represents the number of views and the brown bar represents popularity.  Each bar’s length indicates how that content compares to the average for all content of that type (the percentile).

If the content has as many views or popularity as the average the bar will be half-full.  The more full the bar the higher the metric when compared to the average and the less full the bar the lower the metric when compared to the average. Hovering over each bar will show a specific number for each metric.

By default, each list of content is sorted by popularity with the most popular content with the highest popularity score at the top.  So, if you want your content at the top of the list, create quality plays, formations, and playart that other authors will want to share.