So this thread was referenced awhile back, and I have been curious about it since then. Can anyone from the Starstruck year fill me in on why this post got so popular. How to build "Hugger" robot?
That thread was the culmination of many threads that year pretty much asking (sometimes demanding) for instructions to build a robot, and the attitude of the poster helped push things over the edge in terms of frustration.
I saw that, but I still dont see why people kept opening the post to make it rack up so many views.
Might’ve just been people going back to trace the arguments/discussions, idk
Also the view count will certainly jump now that you’ve linked it and your post is in the “recents” queue on the front page 
I remember a couple things that kept me coming back to look at that thread: one was the term “hugger,” which I thought was a funny and apt name for something that was also commonly known as a claw. The other was the somewhat astonishing intensity of the debate that sprang up around that post.
Note also that there were a lot of posts deleted from that thread (and I don’t think they still show up as “deleted” post-discourse migration), so the actual scale of the discussion was probably a little closer matched with the view count than it may seem now.
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I looked at it before the migration, and while there were quite a bit of “deleted” posts, it didn’t seem like they could fully account for the view count.
I’m almost 100% certain a script was run by someone to inflate the view count. When originally posted, you could see the view count incrementing several times a second. There was another thread that the same thing happened to, I forget which one that was. Now it could also have been a bug in the forum software, perhaps Dillon knows.
No, this is a site for robotics nerds - it must have been automated with hardware 
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esoTalk added another view every time a thread was refreshed in a browser. This could have been as simple as someone turning on a chrome extension that refreshed the page every X seconds.
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The page also didn’t even fully have to load, you could spam F5 as fast as humanly possible and it would still count each refresh as a view.
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