Reset Showcase Item Views/Controlling View Count Abuse?

[Hentai]

Recently one of my users was caught with a refresh bot/browser extension that was spamming reloads. Apparently my users are extremely petty and are having viewcount wars. I already issued warning to the users involved but as a punishment I would like to reset the views on their items to 0.

Is there any way to manually change the views on a specific showcase item, maybe via phpMyAdmin? Do you have any suggestions on how to prevent abuse in future beyond myself making a sticky announcement post and adding it to my site's rules (which I already have done)

 

[Bob]

ya, its easy via phpmyadmin

Table: xf_nflj_showcase_item
Field: view_count

just find the record by item_id (which is the number in the URL) and edit the data in the view_count field for that record. ie, http://xenaddons.com/showcase/1969-boss-429.2/ <--- the item_id for that is 2

If that doesn't make sense, let me know so I can try and explain better.

Do you have any suggestions on how to prevent abuse

unfortunately, not much can be done about it. We are discussing adding code to AMS (another addon of mine) that prevents the Article Author and any members that are "staff" from registering view counts when viewing articles. That won't stop other users tho (or guests).

Same thing can happen with a thread or a forum. A rendered page counts as a page view.