Is scraping triggering a profile view? How to avoid?

Question

I want to generate some stats myself exclusively concerning my profile. For that purpose I chose to use Google Apps Script.

With it, I'm making a request to my profile page with UrlFetchApp and I'm extracting from the response text the "d+ profile views" text (where d is a digit).

However, it seems that each request triggers a profile view. (Either that or coincidentally someone visited my profile at that time, which I doubt).

I would like to prevent my script to trigger a profile view, perhaps by adding something in the header?

Is it possible?

Answer 1

Making an HTTP call to your profile page triggers the view count to go up, at least once every 15 minutes.

Don't scrape for data that is available in the Stack API. Users-by-id offers you in the user type the view_count which holds your profile view count.

Here is a stack snippet that fetches your profile view count for MSE:

// find the html element and bind the model
function showItem(item) {
   document.getElementById('vc').textContent = item.view_count;
}

var xhr = new XMLHttpRequest();

// what do we fetch
xhr.open(
  'GET',
  'https://api.stackexchange.com/2.2/users/271865?order=desc&sort=reputation&site=meta&filter=!)RwcIFN1K)cI6NxyKTp7GH9R');

// handle success !
xhr.addEventListener('load', function() {
  var data = JSON.parse(xhr.responseText);
  if (data.items && data.items.length > 0) {
    showItem(data.items[0]);
  }
});

// just do it
xhr.send();

<div>
Profile views:&nbsp;<span id='vc'></span>
</div>

Keep in mind you can only make 300 calls per day from one IP. If you need more, register your app for a key.