[Robbie]

We had a question about hit counters - I thought it would be easier to explain to everyone in one go.

There are two types of hit counter - Story, Chapter.

Story Counters

Prior to the upgrade, Story counters were incremented each time a person visited chapter one of the story for the first time each "session". This means the one person visited a story, then visited the following day, it was two "hits".

After the upgrade, we keep a tally of which users have visited a story, so you can visit a story 10000 times and the counter won't budge. If you're not logged on, it records one hit against the IP address of the computer instead.

This is still flawed as
a) if you are not logged on and then log on, you can get two hits. (Note, this doesn't work the other way round )
b) if you are an AOL user, as some others, then you go through a proxy, and chances are someone else has gone through this proxy already. So that won't count as a hit (solution - get a real ISP)

Note: I didn't blank the hit counters at the change over, so old stories will always have much higher hits than the new stories. The new method is more accurate, but will rise much more slowly.

Chapters

The new chapter hit counters use the old method for stories. Each visit counts, regardless. You can boost your own hit counter by hitting refresh each day if you're that bothered.

This gives an accurate represenation of how popular early chapters are compared to later chapter, including repeat visits and returns. It's not an accurate count of people, though.

Chapter counters only started when the new site was launched, so chapter counters for the old stories will be lower than they really are.

If you've got any questions, post below.

[Sulriel]

Sounds really good.

so the story counter is the "hits" under the "ratings" heading on the right side menu and that will be the "hits prior to the upgrade plus one-only-ever for each unique visitor/IP"

and the chapter counters tally each time someone/anyone hits.

that sounds really good.

is there a way to check the story and/or chapter hits without hitting your own first chapter? ...not that I'm obsessive about that or anything like that...

[Robbie]

Nope. Sorry.

[Sulriel]

it's ok. ... just thought I'd ask.