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Thursday, March 18, 2004

The Site Meter black hole.

Fie on Site Meter, the friendly, free site-traffic counter that has tossed out all record of all your visits on two occasions this month. Imagine my surprise when yesterday's 83 visits to the front page and Tuesday's 76 suddenly showed up as round zeroes. (Happily, I use AddFreeStats, too, which kept on counting. Otherwise, I would have felt abandoned!)

You can watch the traffic screech to a halt on this chart, which AFS and my site host both say shows completely unreal drops in traffic. I wouldn't care so much, except that the Blogging Ecosystem, for example, uses Site Meter statistics to rank blogs by traffic. I had been averaging in the low sixties on the front page, but I'm now way down. Alas.

The first time Philocrites fell into its black hole, Site Meter just started counting again after a few days. This time, I sent an e-mail — and several hours later, the counter started ticking again — but not without erasing five days' statistics in the process.

It almost makes you distrust statistics . . .

Copyright © 2004 by Philocrites | Posted 18 March 2004 at 7:02 PM

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3 comments:

Melanie:

March 19, 2004 08:35 PM | Permalink for this comment

I just got one. Boy, a blogger can get seriously caught up in watching the stats.....

Philocrites:

March 20, 2004 08:18 AM | Permalink for this comment

It's like spying on the people who are spying on you...

Philocrites:

March 21, 2004 10:05 AM | Permalink for this comment

And now Site Meter has dropped all stats from March 10 on. So goodbye, Site Meter! We'll give a test-drive to Nedstat Basic, which shares AddFreeStats' unpleasant habit of tossing pop-ads at you when you go to look at the stats. Sorry about that.



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