How views are counted

When a page is served we write down that a request arrived. That alone never reaches any public number. The page then loads, and a few hundred bytes of script say so. Only then is it a view.

A preview fetcher does not run that script. Neither does a crawler, a link checker, or a script someone pointed at a page. So none of them are in the number.

The cost is real and runs the other way: if you block scripts, your visit is never counted, even though you are a person. We would rather be under than over.

The headline figure on a dashboard is people, not views, and the two are counted separately. Reloading a page adds a view. It does not add a person.

Repeat loads are capped at 20 per visitor per day, and clicks on any one link at 5. Past that, a refresh key does nothing at all.

Anything that identifies itself as automated is recorded in a column of its own. The member sees it. It is never added to the number on their page, and it is never quietly dropped either — if a link is posted somewhere busy, a great deal of that traffic is software, and that is worth knowing rather than hiding.

A page your browser fetched ahead of time, in case you were about to open it, is not recorded at all — in any column. It is not a machine pretending to be you; it is your browser being quick on your behalf, and you are about to arrive and be counted once.

Your address is never written down. What is written is a keyed digest of a truncated address — the network rather than the connection — mixed with the day and the page you looked at, then cut to sixteen characters.

Because the day and the page are part of it, the same visitor produces a different value tomorrow, and a different value on somebody else’s page. That is not an encrypted link between the two. There is no link between the two. It means we cannot tell you how many visitors came back, and we have decided that is the right way round.

Those records are deleted after 35 days. What survives is counts: how many people, from which kind of place, on which kind of device. Nothing in that can be traced to anyone, including by us.

Which platform sent you — Discord, TikTok, a search engine — and your country. Nothing finer than a country, ever. No city, no address, no device fingerprint, no name.

A country with fewer than 3 visitors is not named at all, and is folded into a single “too few to name” row. A page with forty visitors showing “one view from Liechtenstein” is not analytics. For somebody with a small audience and a person they would rather avoid, it is a notification.

Send DNT or Sec-GPC and no row is written about you at all — not in the view column, not in the machine column, nowhere. This costs members real views and is honoured anyway, because a product arguing that its numbers are trustworthy cannot also override the one request a visitor is able to make.

A link on a member’s page is an ordinary link and goes straight where it says it goes. There is no redirector in front of it. That gives a worse click count — a click is only counted when the page manages to report it afterwards — and it means no link on this site can ever be pointed somewhere else later.