On-Site Hit Counter

Posted: Sat Aug 20, 2011 10:53 pm

In addition to the on-site counter, the one that comes with RN, I have Stat Counter. What I am noticing is a vast discrepancy between what the on-site counter records and what stat counter records. Anybody else have this problem or care about this problem?
The stat counter seems to barely record any activity by comparison to the on-site counter. I realize the on-site counts my hits during maintenance or writing articles and editing them. It just seems to count a whole lot more of other hits that I can't determine their origin or whether they are real people or bots. Can anyone give me some insite as to what is going on with these numbers I am seeing. I notice the extremely large number reflected on this site, although I realize this site does get a lot of hits, although 100+ million seems a bit high.
If this has been discussed before, please point me to that discussion, and as always, thanks for any feedback.

Posted: Sun Aug 21, 2011 1:27 am

A large percentage of traffic these days is bots and search engine spiders. I'm going to hazard a guess that your stat counter uses javascript which wont count bots.

Search engines are tracked in the statistics module, so they are counted as hits. Just checked one of my sites and I was at 48% search engines... So that may account for some of the discrepancy.

Unless you have modified rnconfig.php admin stats are not counted.

Posted: Sun Aug 21, 2011 2:27 pm

Thanks for the reply, spas. I thought it might have been bots. Forgot about spiders and other creepy crawlers. Oh well, hope they enjoyed the visit......

Now back to the other problem at hand.

Posted: Sat Sep 03, 2011 12:51 am

This is along the lines of the original topic. I have twitted a few articles from my site and see results in the onsite counter and visitors on my page. My concern is that my add on site counter (Stat Counter) does not pick up (record) any of the hits. I have that code, installed in the footer of RN. Could this be the problem and should it be installed elsewhere (similar to google analytics verification code)? I like the info I get from SC and I realize RN does not create, nor support SC, so just let me know if I need to take this up with SC.

Posted: Sat Sep 03, 2011 7:27 am

Your footer should load on all pages unless something is wrong. Verify that the footer is loading on the pages in question. If it is, you should be good to go.

Posted: Wed Sep 07, 2011 12:31 am

I see the sc, on every page, in the footer. I now have the counter hidden, except for 'numbers' showing, which takes anyone to view stats. Somehow, twitter doesn't seem to reveal the source url of any hits.

Just so I'm clear on this...i see stat counter in the footer of any page I click on. Therefore, SC is loading on all those pages? ' Question

'Verified.

Posted: Wed Sep 07, 2011 3:56 am

Your SC code should fire upon every page load if it is installed in the site footer.
I'm not familiar with SC but in theory, if it tracks referrers (not just visits), then it should record visits from Twitter or any other site for that matter.
If your third party counter/tracker shows incoming hits from other websites then I do not see any reason why it shouldn't show Twitter as an incoming referrer, provided of course that people are actually following links from there.
Don't forget also that depending on the length of the URL (and twitter account options) when they are posted in a tweet, Twitter uses a URL shortening service, so referrers *might* be being shown as coming from that service rather than Twitter itself.

Posted: Sun Sep 18, 2011 3:57 pm

Quote:

"Don't forget also that depending on the length of the URL (and twitter account options) when they are posted in a tweet, Twitter uses a URL shortening service, so referrers *might* be being shown as coming from that service rather than Twitter itself."

I did some looking around (in google anal-ytics) and notice a lot of hits from t.co, which turns out to be twitter. They use an url shortener and protect users from malicious sites. Therefore, stat counter, ignores it.

I have also found out, certain IP addresses shown on my RN site, are bots. Is there an easy modification to that code to have it block counting certain IP addresses, like 77.88.*.* or 66.249.*.* but not block them from the site??

Some of these are just bots from adsense, amazon, Topsy Labs, etc. The ones from t.co, I would let still be counted (Twitter).

At least let me know where to look, config, mainfile, or where code needs modification. Thanks.

Posted: Mon Sep 19, 2011 1:51 am

You could modify mainfile.php so it doesn't 'include' includes/counter.php
There's an example function on my site [ Only registered users can see links on this board! Get registered or login! ]

Or another option would be to modify the file includes/counter.php directly to exclude those hits.
You could use something like

Code:




$ip = getenv ("REMOTE_ADDR");


echo $ip;

to determine the visitors IP address.