A 2015 script still reloads counters
The previous generation of this service shipped a mouse-tracking script. It loaded the counter image once, normally, and then loaded it again on every mouse movement — with coordinates in…
What stats2.gif actually is
There is a file in this project's image folder called stats2.gif. It is 366 bytes, dated March 2018, and it appears in exactly zero lines of source code. On 23 August 2026 it was served…
Three columns left over from Stats4U 2
The main counter table here has 166,436 rows and a number of columns that look like they matter. Three of them are lastdomain, firstdomain and userdomain. They hold data: lastdomainnot…
We stopped collecting screen sizes
This service used to record screen resolution. The browser script read window.screen and sent it along as res=1920x1080, and the statistics page had a panel for it. It does not any more.…
The who-is-online list, promised in 2012 and now live
On 25 August 2012, a post on this blog announced that the statistics fields had started refreshing by themselves, and finished with a sentence: "The planned feature, the 'Who is online'…
Counter number one has been running since 2006
The first counter ever created on this site was created on 18 November 2006, at three minutes past eleven at night. It has the ID 1. It counted visitors today. It stands at 703,428, and it…
Why we kept the 2006 counter designs
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.…
What happened between 2015 and 2026
Before this week, the most recent post on this blog was dated September 2015. That is an eleven-year hole in the middle of it, and it seemed better to explain the hole than to quietly…
Stats4U 3 is here
The site you are reading this on was rebuilt this month — not restyled, rebuilt, starting at the counting path. There is a separate post about the eleven quiet years that led up to it. This…
User's Tab shows now active / inactive and offline users
Stats4U is getting better and better. It is now visible live who is actually viewing a page and who has only opened it in a background tab of the browser. That means the list shows the…
First Windows 10 Users coming in!
Windows 10 users now appear in the statistics in real time. Microsoft launched Windows 10 on 29 July 2015, and the detection is ready for the visitors who have already switched to the new…
7 Steps to Implement Stats4U into the Google Tag Manager
Update, August 2026: the Tag Manager interface in the screenshots below no longer exists, and step 5 — picking document.write — is no longer needed. There is a current version of this…