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…
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.…
Counter numbers are now checked against both tables
Every counter here has a number. It appears in the embed code, in the statistics address, and on however many pages the owner put it. Numbers are handed out by picking a random one between…
Putting a counter in a chomikuj profile
chomikuj.pl is a Polish file-sharing community. Every account has a description field, and a great many people put a visit counter in it. When we finally counted where the counters of this…
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…
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…
Visitor statistics without a 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…
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: lastdomain not…
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.…