This might be a good idea, since it is no different from counting hits on the pages which is employed on wast majority of web sites and nobody seem to have a privacy issues with that. At least it will give an idea of popularity of certain threads/messages.

>Would it not be possible to leave the thread spy numbers there but deactivate the links so that a count of the readers of a message would be there? there would be no way of finding out who actually viewed the messages without the links so privacy would be preserved
>Slán
>~M
>
>>>The title says it all...
>>
>>One spy I know is James Bond. :)
>>
>>For the topic, I wrote a small news about it on the Site News:
>>
>>http://www.levelextreme.com/wconnect/wc.dll?FournierTransformation~2,5,6