Show download count information

[rsenft1]

Something I really like about scidraw.io is the ability to see how many times a graphic has been downloaded. As someone considering making biology icons I would find this to be very motivating to see how many people my graphic is reaching.

[duerrsimon]

Thanks for your input! I can see how this would be useful but it is hard to implement for the following reasons:

• currently our site is completely static and does not track any user information, for download counts depending on how it is implemented one might need a cookie banner cluttering the UX
• since the site is static, some kind of server would be needed to process the download counts
• The illustrations are directly displayed as svg and can also be downloaded/copied with right click. I would need to count those downloads as well which is hard to do to represent the numbers faithfully

I think it would be easier to

• integrate a "built with bioicons" page that allows users to highlight which illustrations they used and reference the paper they used them in
• add a favorite button to the icons so users can save/mark their favorites which can be used as a proxy for downloads

Would those be acceptable alternatives to you?

[rsenft1]

Totally makes sense! Yes I love the idea of an icon to indicate you like a graphic. Maybe it could be a heart or thumbs up (to me a star would indicate it’s being saved as a favorite and I’d be less likely to favorite something because I wouldn’t want a cluttered favorites page)?

So you’re saying this could display the number of hearts/likes overall? Doesn’t that also require a server for storage?

I also really like the “built with bioicons” page idea as well!