Testing with curl tests the wrong thing
A counter request that arrives without a browser identity writes into two of the twelve places a counted visit normally touches. It answers 200. It returns a valid counter image. Nothing…
When adding an index makes things slower
The table of daily figures has one key: the counter and the date together. Five places in the code ask it a different question — not "this counter over time" but "all counters on these…
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,…
One crawler made most of our bot traffic
Counters here keep robots in a column of their own. They are recorded, but they do not move the number on the badge unless the setting is switched on. That separation makes it easy to ask a…
How we detect a broken counter
A counter can break quietly. The site gets redesigned, the embed does not survive the move, and nothing announces it — the statistics simply stop, and the owner finds out months later, if…
Why a fifth of the page list says N/A
The page list on a statistics page names which pages the visits landed on. On 26 August 2026 that table held 101,485 rows, and 20,055 of them — 19.8 % — have the page recorded as N/A. That…
Which counter designs actually get drawn
This service offers 461 counter designs. On 25 August 2026 it drew 24,285 counter images, 22,985 of which named a design. Thirty-nine distinct designs appeared in that day's traffic.…
Which platforms our counters live on
The last step of adding a counter here has a section called "Where does it go?" — a short paragraph for each platform, explaining where the code belongs. WordPress, WordPress.com, Blogger,…
Two ways to miscount an access log
A week of changes here rested on counts taken from one day of the access log: a million lines, a hundred thousand of them ours. To find out whether any of it worked, the same counts have to…
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…
Six finished features and the way back to them
On 23 August 2026 this site answered 101,461 requests. In all of them, the owner token — the ?t= that unlocks the settings box on a statistics page — appeared exactly zero times. Not…
Where the about page numbers come from
There are six numbers across the top of the about page now: people online right now, visitors yesterday, counters in use, countries in the last thirty days, designs to choose from, and the…