A bounce rate needs one bit, not a tracker
Until 28 August this site did not show a bounce rate, and the about page said that was deliberate: it would need a session followed across several page views, and that would need a consent…
What deleting a counter actually touches
Deleting a counter here empties 33 tables. Yesterday it emptied 25. The eight it missed were all created the day before, between 11:10 in the morning and 15:10 in the afternoon. 33 tables…
Why we can't count returning visitors
There is no returning-visitor figure anywhere in Stats4U. It is not missing because nobody got round to it. It was built, run once against real data, and taken back out on 27 August 2026,…
Why we don't email our old users
The counter table on this service holds 4,148 e-mail addresses. They belong to counters created over the past twenty years, back when a counter came with an address field and people filled…
What the AI may and may not write
At the top of a public statistics page here there can be two or three sentences describing what the counter did this month. They are written by a language model. The model invents nothing,…
How we count clicks privately
A counter answers "how many came". The more useful question is usually "how many did something" — clicked the contact link, opened the download, went out to a social profile. This site has…
A counter that needs no cookie banner
Most analytics need a consent banner because most analytics store something on the visitor's device: a cookie, an entry in local storage, an identifier that survives until tomorrow. That…
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.…
How the toplist works, and opting out
stats4u.net has ranked its busiest counters since the beginning — a 2012 post already talks about improving it. The current version lives at /top, and it works differently underneath than…
New privacy policy, terms and DPA
As of 19 August 2026, stats4u.net has three legal documents where it used to have one: a rewritten privacy policy, a terms of service, and — new — a data processing agreement (DPA) under…
Why the exclusion list is not hashed
If you build a site, you open it twenty times a day. On a counter with forty visitors a month, half the statistics are you. So there is a setting: do not count visits from my own address.…
Export your data as CSV or JSON
There is a link on your statistics page marked CSV, and next to it one marked JSON. They hand you your numbers as a file. No account, no request form, no waiting for an email with a…