How Views are counted

On this forum, there is a tally of "views" for each topic (subject). I'm wondering what goes into that count. Does a user have to be logged in to count? If a logged in user marks all forums as read (without actually viewing them), does that increase the view count for all previously unread topics? If a topic is viewed multiple times by the same user, even without new posts, does that increase the view count?

I'm pretty sure it's simply a count of the times the link was clicked, for that topic.