The number on the badge is not visitors

A recurring question here is why the number printed on the counter image does not match the number in the statistics. Both are correct. They are answers to different questions, and the badge answers the less interesting one.

What each number counts

The badge shows a lifetime total that goes up by one on every counted image load. Somebody who reads three pages on your site moves it by three.

The statistics page keeps a separate daily row with three figures: hits, which matches the badge's definition; visitors, which goes up only the first time a given visitor is seen that day; and bots, kept apart from both.

Across every counter on this service over the last thirty days: 543,937 hits, 262,984 visitors, 62,872 bots. That is 2.07 hits per visitor — a reasonable number to hold in your head when the two figures on your own page look far apart.

The second reason they differ

The badge is a lifetime total. The daily table is not: it starts on 15 July 2025, because that is when it was created.

Counter number one is this site's own, running since 2006. Its badge stands at 708,983. Its daily table knows 324,948 hits and 65,269 visitors — everything since July 2025 and nothing before. Neither number is wrong; they cover different spans of time.

What is excluded from both

• Reloads. A page reopened in a tab that was left open all day is one visit, not forty. Requests marked as repeats do not increment anything.
• Addresses you have excluded. If you have told a counter to ignore your own range, those visits appear nowhere — not in hits, not in visitors, not in the country or browser lists.
• Bots, unless you switch them on. They are collected either way, so you can see who crawled you without them inflating the badge.

Why the column is named after IP addresses

The database column behind the badge is called ips_all, which reads like "unique addresses" and is not what it holds. It holds hits. The name is left over from an older schema and was never changed, and the field has been read as "visitors" more than once because of it.

Nothing about the counting is wrong. The label on the box is, and a wrong label is quite good at surviving, because everyone who reads it comes away confident.