Article hits counter increments unconditionally for the same user in the same session

[CSGoat0]

What happened?

I've noticed that the article hits counter increases every time a user revisits an article page, even within the same session. This seems to be happening unconditionally without any limitations.

Version

5.4

Expected result

I'm not entirely sure what the intended behavior should be, but I see a few possibilities:

• Once per user lifetime – The counter should increment only once per user for each article, regardless of how many times they visit it (even across different sessions).

• Once per session – The counter should increment only once per user session. If the session ends and the same user visits the article again in a new session, it would increment once more.

• Current behavior (unlimited) – The counter increments unconditionally every time the article is accessed, even by the same user in the same session. (This could potentially be exploited to artificially inflate hit counts or affect layouts that display popular articles.)

Actual result

When a user visits an article, the hits counter increments by 1.
If the same user revisits the article multiple times in the same session, the counter continues to increase.
(visit article +1, go back, revisit the same article +1, and so on)

There is no apparent limitation preventing multiple counts from the same user/session.
This also happens at Preview window at the admin panel.
(Preview +1, close, Preview +1, and so on)

System Information

No response

Additional Comments

I'd appreciate clarification on which behavior is actually intended so I can better understand if this is a bug or working as designed. If it's not intended, I'd be happy to help look into a solution.

Thank you!

Rejection Information

Rejected: 18.03.2026
Reason: Comment

[brianteeman]

Why would you expect the articler hit count to be restricted to once per user or once per lifetime

[CSGoat0]

Why would you expect the article hit count to be restricted to once per user or once per lifetime

Once per user (lifetime for the same user) on the same article would make sense like views on a post on Facebook for example.
There is another possibility that it is designed to increase for the same user, even though, I think it should be limited by something like a session for example.

Otherwise, it is not a good idea to leave an easily incremental element in the layout, If I send multiple requests, I can make many issues. For Example:

• destroying the layout.
• when the number increases too much, there might be an error as the variable is unable to hold such a big number.
• losing the meaning of hits, as the user is able to increase the hits of a specific article which doesn't give "hits" too much consideration.

Not all of this could happen, but that's what I thought of.
What do you think?

[brianteeman]

What do you think?

I think you are redefining the meaning of hits

[CSGoat0]

I think you are redefining the meaning of hits

How?
I am not defining it, I am saying the possibilities.
One of them is the "views" as I have just explained.
The other is it's meant to be as it is, if that's it we should limit it by session to make it a little bit considerable
and to avoid it to be easy increasable.

[brianteeman]

it is working as intended

[mohsinkhan85090]

Thank you for the clarification.

I understand that the current behavior is intentional.
Would the maintainers be open to discussing an optional configuration
(e.g., count hits per session or per user) to prevent artificial inflation?

If this is something acceptable, I would be happy to work on a PR.

[brianteeman]

https://github.com/joomla/joomla-cms/discussions/categories/1-feature-evaluation

[chmst]

The hit counter is a relict from a very early version. It is not a bug - it was intended as it is many years ago - but now it is surely a candidate for improvement (performance).

[brianteeman]

This should be closed as its not a bug and moved to feature evaluation

[bembelimen]

I've moved the issue to discussions, it's a valid request. Solution needs to be discussed.

[CSGoat0]

I tried sending multiple requests using a script.
It worked, look at those photos:

Those photos from a famous website uses Joomla (Linux) not my local host.
I only sent 100 request, I can send a lot more but I don't know if they have block mechanism.
I wanted to show you the impact first.

This might cause overflow problem if increased too much.
Didn't really try (yet) if the overflow would cause internal server error/ database error
or simply the number goes negative.
I feared that the site might block me or it cause an error. I will try to find out the results without breaking something.

[Fedik]

It is expected behavior.
Joomla counts each view. And probably every other statistic system (GA, FB Pixel, Matomo etc) doing the same.

[brianteeman]

What is the problem you are trying to solve

[HLeithner]

The Joomla Maintainer Team decided at the 18.03.2025 meeting to reject this feature.
The conclusion was that we don't want a more sophisticated counter in core, instead @bembelimen is in charge to take the idea with the student further and remove hits from core and convert it into a (core supported) plugin.

Removing this from core is because of the useless number without any meaning and the performance impact (unneeded writes to the db).