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.…
Your counter has been counting robots
Your counter has been counting robots. So has everybody's. Until this month nobody here could tell you how many, because nothing was measuring it — and a crawler that requests a counter…
A counter or an analytics suite?
The honest answer to the question in the title is: it depends what you are asking your statistics to tell you. A visitor counter and a full analytics suite are not two grades of the same…
Counting without a cookie
A visitor counter has one awkward job: it has to tell two visits apart. If it cannot, then one person reloading a page ten times looks like ten people, and the number on your site is…
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…
Flag Counter Wizard
The new Flag Counter wizard system is at /flag-counter. There is a choice between cubic, horizontal and vertical flag counters, in three sizes. Flag types, font colours and the other…
New Flag Counters and site speed stats
Stats4U.net is expanding its features with brand new stylish flag counters for websites. They can be placed on any site to show where its visitors come from. Alongside them there is now a…