Mods can't see your testing area threads. The views count whenever you look at your thread every hour.
lets say you look at a thread 5 times at 1 am - thats 1 view
if you look at it ONCE at 2 am afterwards - that's 2 views.
and so on every hour.
This is because a thread only sees a view for exactly 1 hour. The moment that 1 hour passes - the users viewing the thread are reset and can count as a seperate view again.
So if you posted it a while ago and make edits to it, you'll rack up the views.