Broken stats

[igenlode]

Fanfiction.net visitor stats seem to be permanently broken — possibly because some internal value has rolled over, or as the result of an unintended tweak. I've been waiting to see if they would recover, but either nobody has managed to contact the staff to complain (difficult at the best of times, unless it's a really, really obvious problem that they notice on their own) or else they're not planning to do anything about it.

It's a fairly subtle problem: the code that they use to detect repeat visits appeas to have stopped working, which means that the Visitors versus Page views figures are meaningless. If one person views ten chapters he gets recorded as ten different visitors -- hard to prove without access to the underlying figures, but it's been going on for some time now and the conclusion seems pretty inescapable. Either that, or I'm getting an awful lot of people who come in and read successive chapters at one chapter each, all on the same day... and so are the other users who are complaining about it :-(

For example, today I got nine visitors to the story "Water-horse"... that is to say, four visitors to the first chapter and five more who read one chapter each of the next seven. (I don't know whether chapters 5 and 7 were really skipped as someone began skimming towards the end, or just not recorded; fanfiction.net has always had a tendency to misrecord random single chapters in the middle of a story.)

I'm assuming that what really happened was that I had four visitors to the first chapter, one of whom was actually interested enough for once to read on (this has always been a story that most people abandon at first glance). It's annoying, because I've always relied on the discrepancy of visitor and page view numbers to alert me when I have a 'real' reader, and now the figures are basically synonymous. (But not quite — sometimes you do seem to get multiple views per visitor recorded on the opening chapter, weirdly...)

[Edit: even more weirdly, a few hours later chapters 5 and 7 have now filled in with a single page view each, chapters 6 and 8 have received a second page view from a second 'visitor', and chapter 4 has apparently received a repeat visit from the original reader. The total number of visitors has gone up by two and the number of page views by five... which just happens to be one each on chapters 4-8 inclusive. So did someone come back and reread the end of the story? Did a second person make an additional appearance in order to read a couple of random chapters near the end? We'll never know what was really happening.]

Comments

[sallymn]

Oh, that's a pain but thanks for the information!