I took the page view counts off when migrating to the cloud for a few of reasons:
1. they have a negative impact on performance. Because just looking at something causes an update, it adds processing work and cost one way or another. I know it doesn't sound much in itself but it means pages can't be cached and follows on from there.
2. they are misleading. If 1 person views 5 pages of a topic at 10 posts per page and someone else views 10 pages at 5 posts per page, is it really 15 views? or 2? Does every bot and scraper count as a view? Server-counted views are less than ideal and most that you see are inflated as a result.
3. they are slightly meaningless. Does a topic having 1,000 views or 10,000 views really mean anything? really, beyond someone thinking up a more "click-baitey" title? We are conditioned to count "likes" and "views" because it promotes certain behaviours that are sometimes negative. People start reading the most read topics which is then self-fulfilling. I think "was this content helpful to someone" is more meaningful but much harder to determine.
Having said all that, I do understand why people want them especially for topics you create, to gauge interest etc.. My solution on the TODO list is to link in to the Google Analytics views which should give much better metrics and there are some new technologies on the platform that will make things possible without costing so much (some changes have dependencies on me updating other parts of the system first).
I also want to give more stats on likes / dislikes which can be interesting.
Membership is another one of those things that is hard to judge. If you make parts of any site private, you will increase registrations up to a point because you force people to sign-up just to read. It's interesting to see growth and interest but things like engagements by people posting, returning etc... are more informative (but again, not quite so simple as a single headline number).
There's always something todo and whenever I have time to spend on development, there's usually been other priorities so I can't say with any certainty when I might be able to get to implement any of these things.
