The mouse that kept calling
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 the query string and a flag saying rerun=1. The name is honest: this is the same visit again, not a new one.
Nothing ever read that data. The word rerun appeared in exactly one place in the entire codebase, and that place was the exclusion list for a cache key. It was never analysed. It was counted.
What it was doing to the numbers
Measured on 19 August 2026:
- 2,420 of 12,227 counter images that day carried
rerun=1— 19.8 % - 31 counters affected
- a single address fired 248 times at one counter
- on one counter, 251 of that day's 294 hits were repeats
That last counter's statistics did not describe its audience. They described one visitor's mouse moving across a page.
What changed, and what did not
A request carrying rerun=1 is now treated as a reload: it does not increment anything. Measured again on 25 August 2026, after the fix: 3,784 of 24,285 counter images still arrive with the flag — 15.6 %.
The traffic did not stop. It cannot: the script is embedded in pages that belong to other people, some of whom have not touched their site in a decade. What stopped is the counting. The requests still cost bandwidth and a little CPU, and they no longer distort anyone's numbers.
The neighbour that looks identical and is not
There is a second flag in those URLs, nocount=1, and it deliberately does not stop counting. That reads like a bug until you look at where it comes from: the counter creator writes it into the finished embed code, where it means "the old wizard block in this design must not fire". It was never a request to skip counting.
Making it skip counting would have been a one-line change, and it would have silently switched off every counter using an adjustable design. One of them had 574 image loads on the day this was checked, every single one carrying nocount=1.
Two flags, in the same query string, spelled about equally suggestively. One had to start being ignored and the other had to keep being ignored, and the only way to tell which was which was to find out where each one is written.