Thursday 28 July 2016

Page view counter has been removed from this blog

I have removed the page view counter from this blog.

In the last week I've had over 5000 hits from Russia, none of which have done more than click the counter around. Normally the count from Russia would be in the low hundreds.

It's akin to having Clever Hans, the counting horse, in the side bar. Once you know what is happening, it loses all of its charm. Consequently, and sadly, it has had to go to the knackers yard.

15 comments:

Slorm said...

It happened to me last week, I have ignored that and continue with my counter online.
The charm is when you see that the people comments your posts... the numbers are just numbers...

artourious said...

just thought you were really popular

Oli said...

It's happening to me as well James - double the normal hits, from Russia.

Jay White said...

I noticed the same on mine. I think I may remove it as well ...

Gonsalvo said...

I would agree. "This has all happened before, and it will all happen again", but the Russia bump usually fades after a month or so.

Derek said...

I noticed something similar with my blog, lots of traffic from Russia. It had little to do with other wargamers visiting my blog and stood out because I have a very small following. It's the internet equivalent of 'junk mail', it happens, even if you could block the referring IP address it would change and then you could block that and then it changes to a new one and so on.

Take it as a 'tick' that your blog has enough traffic to be 'noticed' :)

Cheers

Derek

William Butler said...

I've been experiencing the same thing. Over 2/3's of the page views are from Russia.

Fritz II. said...

It also happened to me on my blog. What is the background for that. Normally my blog is clicked about 100 times a day.

Nathan said...

That is interesting. I've also had a lot (relatively) of page views from Russia over the last week or so. I wonder what is going on - bored workers in one of Putin's internet troll farms discovering an interest in miniature wargaming?

Stuart said...

Can we keep the horse picture?

JAMES ROACH said...

The counter might not have gone forever. I'll keep a check on the blog stats and if the problem goes away I'll reintroduce it. The thing I can't understand, is how the 'visits' turn the counter without registering on the 'viewed page' breakdown - but then, I'm not technically minded.

Steve-the-Wargamer said...

Spam bots and web crawlers - so they are accessing the pages in a different way than a real human would - hence they register one way and not the other... best thing is to totally ignore page views - work of the devil - before you know it you're writing posts just to generate views rather than to please yourself... :o)

Jonathan Freitag said...

I have not been hit by the Russian Invasion (yet). Perhaps, I am below the Russian Radar? Google Analytics seems to scrub these types of visits out of statistics, regardless.

Jason said...

I have the same thing going on (I have been meaning to ask the question too!). Oddly mine are hits from the USA ! Each day without fail I get about 49 hits on every post I have ever posted - it has ruined what had been up until then, quite interesting stats.

Kaptain Kobold said...

My blog hits seem mostly 'normal'. What was strange was discovering, earlier this year, that someone was cloning my blog, post by post and even comment by comment. and that Google searches were giving the clone priority over my original material. Fortunately Google also have a process for reporting such things. It's bloody hard work, but after a month or so my clone disappeared from the searches. I think it's still out there, but no-one finds it any more, so I leave it be.