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 service actually live, chomikuj was 672 of the 1,147 whose page address we know — 58.6 %, more than every other platform combined.

Until recently the setup help did not mention it at all. This post is the missing page.

The one thing that matters

The description field does not accept scripts. That single fact decides everything else, because the first tab of the embed step offers a <script> snippet — the default, and the wrong choice here. Pasted into the description, it will be stripped or shown as text, and nothing will count.

The <img> tab is the right one. It produces a plain image tag, which is exactly what a description field will keep.

Step by step

• Create a counter on the front page and pick a design.
• At the embed step, switch to the <img> tab. Do not take the first line.
• Fill in the address of the chomik in the field below the code. This is worth doing: without it, the statistics have no page to attribute the visits to, and the per-page list stays empty.
• Copy the image tag into the description and save.
• Open the profile page once and check that the counter appears. If it does, the job is finished.

What that gives up, and what it does not

The image tag counts every load of the picture. It cannot report screen size, and it cannot do the automatic click tracking that the script version offers, because there is no script running on the page to observe anything. Everything else is the same: daily hits and visitors, countries and cities, referrers, browsers and devices, hours of the day.

Nothing is given up in privacy terms either, and there was not much to give up: this counter stores nothing on the visitor's device in either form — no cookie, no local storage — so a description-field counter needs no consent banner either.

One practical note. Because the picture is fetched directly, a counter in a description is visible to anyone who visits the chomik. For the numbers without the badge, there is a design that draws a 1×1 transparent pixel and nothing else. It counts identically.

That this page exists at all came out of a measurement rather than a request. The platform list in the setup help was assembled the way such lists usually are — from the web the developer happens to know — and counting put chomikuj ahead of everything on it. There is a separate post about that count.