How the toplist works, and opting out
stats4u.net has ranked its busiest counters since the beginning — a 2012 post already talks about improving it. The current version lives at /top, and it works differently underneath than…
A backup in the web root is a source leak
Before editing a large file, the natural move is to copy it first. cp index.php index.php.vor-aenderung, then work. If that file sits in the directory the web server publishes, the entire…
New privacy policy, terms and DPA
As of 19 August 2026, stats4u.net has three legal documents where it used to have one: a rewritten privacy policy, a terms of service, and — new — a data processing agreement (DPA) under…
A language code that looked like Perl
On 19 August 2026 we added a rule to .htaccess blocking a class of file that should never be served directly to a browser: leftover source-code copies sitting in the web root after an edit…
Compressing the same file every time
Apache compresses responses on the fly. For a page that is different every time, that is the only option. For a stylesheet that changes once a month, it means the server does the same work…
Why the exclusion list is not hashed
Building a site means opening it twenty times a day. On a counter with forty visitors a month, half the statistics are the author. So there is a setting: do not count visits from my own…
A page address longer than its column
On 9 August 2026, twenty counter images failed to render. Not drew wrong, not drew slowly — the visitor got nothing at all where a counter should have been. The cause was a page address…
What came off the about page, and why
The old about page had a feature list on it. Rebuilding that page meant reading the list line by line against the software, and four entries no longer matched it. One of them had 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…
The header and footer now run full width
A small change visible on every page here: the dark band at the top and the footer at the bottom now run the full width of the window. Until today they sat inside the same 1180-pixel column…
Page views, daily visitors and the counter total: which number means what?
A counter image, a daily visitor report and a period total can show different numbers without a fault. Before comparing them, check the metric, the time period and the counter number.…
Read referring domains without guessing missing traffic sources
The referring-domain report describes source information that reached Stats4U. It is not a complete list of every route to the website, and a row is not automatically a distinct person.…