Home > Encounters of the Third Kind > spooky stats, unreliable stats or meddling?

spooky stats, unreliable stats or meddling?

May 14, 2009 Rolling Leave a comment Go to comments

This is about stats on this blog. Am not an avid blogger. And am not that concerned about statistics either. Generally I do not even notice the counter to check the number of hits this site gets.

But today, because I had written something that I had reason to believe is controversial, I had checked when I opened my browser window. Usually with Firefox you have the option of saving tabs as they are when you log off and are closing the window. Next time you log in it opens exactly at the same page and state that you left it earlier.

So what I had seen at first was the hit counter showing a number that was like 9743 or  9763.

Suddenly when I went to a different page of the blog and came back the number had changed to 9277! 500 short of what there was almost.

I have a vague impression that I had seen this at other times but because I had never consciously wanted to know is why I always thought it must be my mistake and in any case what does it matter?

But tonight I had checked and therefore was surprised to see this aberration.

It is spooky – is someone playing tricks with this site? I often a huge number of bad spam written in bad Russian which is also quite surprising. Never anything else but that.

It is eerie, scary. Disturbing. I hope am wrong and everything is fine and that this would stop.

O even as I finished this went back and see the 9277 is gone and it is back where it was 9747 in the hit counter….this is scary…..

Categories: Encounters of the Third Kind Tags: , , ,
  1. Nita
    May 15, 2009 at 16:28 | #1
    Reply | Quote

    I read it in the morning itself. It’s in the wordpress news. They have changed the Time Zone for the stats. Now the stats match our time zone so I think that is why the change. Nothing to worry really. At least that must be it.

  2. Rolling
    May 15, 2009 at 02:29 | #3
    Reply | Quote

    :) we had done an experiment in school to see how it happens, because they were curious about how the program works, everybody clicked it from different computers, everybody read nearly three pages at a time, but each access got recorded as one hit. So I had reason to be surprised.
    As for spamming, there is only one particular group or people that spam me, because my site is not professional or commercial, there is nothing in it for spammers.

  3. priyank
    May 14, 2009 at 21:27 | #4
    Reply | Quote

    Rule of thumb: About 20% of visitors are spammers. Also, ‘hits’ is not the same as ‘unique visitors’ – 1 visitor my generate multiple hits because a ‘hit’ is recorded everytime a browser requests something from a server. So if your blog page has 10 images, your hits would be 1 (the page itself) + 10 (images) = 11. However, none of these explanations solve ‘The mystery of lost hits.’ hehe :)

  1. No trackbacks yet.