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In order to determine accurate view counts on pages, Stack Exchange tracks several key factors. It works relatively well, although it does tend to age over time enough that it isn't 100% accurate.

While not perfectly accurate in determining if you have viewed a page, when the software has a record of you viewing a page, it is 100% accurate; you viewed it.

In the case where we absolutely know that the user has previously viewed a page, it would be nice to visually indicate that. Especially since this is literally already built in. All it would need is to pass the resulting boolean flag to the user view in order for the indicator to render.

It could simply be some small green text next to the view count which said ( previously viewed by you ).

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    I think the way the view counter works is that the info on who just visited the page is stored for 15 minutes and then discarded. If you don’t vote or anything there’s no good way for the server to remember you were on the page past that point
    – Laurel
    Commented Oct 10, 2019 at 2:50
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    @Laurel - It used to be similar to that, but has since been improved. I am well aware of the design. However, I believe the time window is now much longer due to improvements in caching mechanisms.
    – Travis J
    Commented Oct 10, 2019 at 3:03
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    What would be the benefit of this? And what about questions that have been edited since you viewed them?
    – Luuklag
    Commented Oct 10, 2019 at 7:36
  • @Luuklag - It is existing information that users can use to improve their experience. Why wouldn't that be included?
    – Travis J
    Commented Oct 10, 2019 at 18:22

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Alternative placement

I think such a message (or in general an an indicator) would be much more useful if placed somewhere on the question list. This would help me to decide whetehr I want to open a question again or not. After opening a question... not that useful.

Search extension

Additionaly there could be filter for it too like:

seen-question:yes|no

with this filter it would be easier to find questions I haven't seen yet.

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  • In the question list, your browser should already tell you that you have previously viewed the post, through the visited link color feature.
    – dim
    Commented Oct 10, 2019 at 7:48
  • @dim yeah, on one machine... but I have more then one - what now? Also how do I find them if I'm looking for new questions or want to list those I've seen? ;-]
    – shiny-metal
    Commented Oct 10, 2019 at 7:49

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