Watched Counter

I'd like to suggest a "Number of users watching this thread" counter, perhaps placed after the "hits" counter in the forum listings. It doesn't serve much function outside of quests/creative writing, admittedly, but within those sub-forums, I think it'd be pretty handy all around.

As a reader, something like that tells you how many people consider a story "worth coming back to", or "worth being alerted for". When a user compares that to the number of hits the story has, they can make a value judgement on whether they think a story would be worth their time at-a-glance, based on how many other users thought the same, without requiring a scoring system or a likes/dislikes bar, neither of which strike me as good ideas for obvious reasons.

As a writer, it gives you a certain amount of feedback too, somewhere between "obsessively reading the 'who's viewing this page' box" and "looking at the comments to see who actually engaged". I'm sure some authors would obsess over it, I know I would, but, let's be real, if they're the type to do that, they're already obsessing over the hit counter, and the "who's here" box, and who's commenting. One more metric won't make or break things.

To be clear, it would be anonymous. I'm not asking for a notification saying "so-and-so watched your thread" just, like, a numerical metric somewhere.

BONUS:

Also, ideally there would be a "unique hits" counter, so you could see roughly how many hits are returns, vs. how many people drop it after one visit, but the site might not be tracking that already, making it possibly a nightmare to implement, and it would be less useful by itself anyway. Although, the two together would give an even clearer picture of the situation to the reader and the author, which is why I still mention it.

Thanks for your time. Sorry if this has been asked before.