259 designs, and 115 of them are the originals

The rebuild came with an obvious temptation: throw out the counter graphics from 2006 and start clean. They are bitmaps. They are dated. Nobody would design them that way now.

They stayed. All of them.

The count

There are 259 designs on offer. The split matters more than the total:

• 115 are the originals — the classic counter strips and panels that have been here since 2006.
• 144 are new, drawn as SVG: sharp at any size, and a fraction of the weight of the images they sit beside.

The new ones come in families, because a counter should suit the page it goes on rather than shouting over it: minimal strips, badges, cards, pill shapes, terminal and odometer styles, rings, columns, retro and digital faces, and a futuristic family that is the only group that moves. There are also two invisible counters, for measuring without putting anything on the page at all.

Why the old ones stayed

Because somebody chose them.

A counter is not a component in a design system, it is a thing a person picked out for their page — sometimes twenty years ago, in many cases the same week they built the site. Replacing that with something more tasteful, uninvited, is not an upgrade. It is walking into somebody's house and rearranging the shelves.

There is a practical argument too, and it is the stronger one: the embed code from 2013 still works. Nothing needs re-pasting, no page needs editing, and nobody has to be told that their site broke because of a decision taken somewhere else. The classics gallery is open, and they can still be chosen today.

What was repaired

Several old designs had stopped working long before anyone noticed. They were querying database tables that had been replaced years earlier, and they simply returned nothing — which, as noted elsewhere, looks a lot like a counter showing a small number.

Four of them are back: the graph panel, the country map, and two chart styles. Their queries were rewritten against the current tables, and the charting class they depended on was recovered from an old backup rather than reimplemented.

What could not be saved

Five designs are gone: numbers 11, 16, 20, 27 and 33. They depended on data and program code from the previous version of this site that no longer exists in any form — not tables that changed shape, but tables that were never carried over at all.

They could have been rebuilt as something that looks similar and shows different data. That would have been worse than removing them, because a design that quietly means something else is a design that lies. If you used one of these, one of the 259 will do the job, and the support form is there if it is not obvious which.

The point of having 259 of anything

It is not choice for its own sake. A counter that matches the page it lives on gets kept; one that clashes gets removed within a week. The single most common reason a counter disappears from a site is not that the owner stopped caring about visitors — it is that the thing looked wrong.