Remember the fanatics who saw that their webpages were only getting 5 hits a day, so they manually editted the number every few hours to make it look like their sites were popular? Then of course the late 1990's came and cron jobs were thrown together to manipulate the hit counts automatically! Then came 2000 and suddenly a document is given a 50 thousand hit count before the page is even posted in the public's view. Of course, the cool people just generated a (pseudo)random number to show as the hit count on each hit. And then there were those who just put a static number in their plain HTML documents to make it appear as though they had a counter when they never did. See, history can be fun.