in reply to Home node counting?

A "hit counter" is pointless in the face of proxy caching and robots. A "hit counter" that is IMG SRC driven doubly so, since many visitors may have image loading turned off.

That's why I voted this -1, since I have the power.

-- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker

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RE: RE: Home node counting?
by IndyZ (Friar) on Jun 18, 2000 at 06:55 UTC
    You are right Randal. For accurate counting, a "hit counter" is totally pointless. However, sometimes it is nice to know how many people visit your pages, and since I don't have access to vroom's server logs to get an accurate load count, I just have to improvise.

    On another note, I feel honored to be flambe'd by the mighty merlyn.

    =Brian

[reply]
      And IndyZ spoke:
      However, sometimes it is nice to know how many people visit your pages
      But you can't know that. A single "hit" to an image could be 100 people at aol.com, or a hundred people could all hit with images turned off. The numbers are totally uncorrelated. Thus, it's not just vanity that says that hit counters are useless; it's completely unrelated to reality.

      -- Randal L. Schwartz, Perl hacker

[reply]
        As usual, I will walk away from this little arguement as the loser. However, my ego says that I could really care less that my hits are accurate, I did it to show off. And with that, I would like to officially end this nonsense.

        IndyZ

[reply]

In Section Cool Uses for Perl