Hello, guys!
I was just told about this anti-counter thread, please let me introduce the other side. Not to promote or anything - just to clarify things.
I know these days people do worry about the malicious activities.
I'm a programmer of the masterstats.com counter, so this would be pretty technical.
We use plain and simple Javascript code for our counter, that anybody who can read - can read.
We don't use <script src=URL> - so, after you got your counter code nothing could be changed and your user will not download and/or execute nothing you are not aware of.
Looking at the code (I can send an example in case you're interested) you can see that we don't collect any "more personal" info about the user's system - or you can take my word on that. Actually we don't collect any info about the users' OS, plugins, browser type, screen resolution etc.
Right now this Javascript code is being executed about 12 mln times/day on different systems, browsers etc. - without any complains. Or if something is wrong - we fix it.
Next - the redirections. First of all, if the user clicks the MS counter image he opens a pop-up, so, he actually won't leave your page (target=_blank in the counter code). Then, our stats says that only 1-2 visitor of 1000 clicks the counter icon, which means 0.1-0.2%. They are all taken to the ranking pages of the appropriate category, so all adult/erotic sites will redirect to
http://erotic.masterstats.com/
This is probably a subject to change - but webmasters will be notified as they always are in case of any changes on our side. The part of the new targeting will be the storefront - plane and simple, no any downloads, dialers or whatever was mentioned.
The counter is affiliated with Proadult.com, so you could be sure, no malicious things will ever happen.
And the last thing - it was mentioned that you can use your server logs. Sure you can. In case you have it, in case you have purchased the proper sofware, in case your server is powerfull enough to analyse the huge logs. If you have all these things you better run your own logs and have more precise data than we can ever give you, no doubt.
But if your site is hosted at some regular hoster's old busy overloaded servers you probably don't have all these things or don't want all the hustles.
Or if your servers already are busy with the regular jobs, or if you don't want to invest in customary log analysing sofware.
We keep stats plain and simple, easy to switch from site to site, easy to compare, easy to see all kinds of summaries. Right now we're preparing the new 2.2 GHz AMD64 Opteron Quad servers for this project together with the huge disk arrays. (Oops, I'm sorry, I'm actually not the hardware guy - it shows
processor : 3
vendor_id : AuthenticAMD
cpu family : 15
model : 5
model name : AMD Opteron(tm) Processor 848
stepping : 10
cpu MHz : 2193.624
cache size : 1024 KB
I think they are in fact 2.4GHz, the latest 64bit ones). Here we have our little soapbox
Our counter plain responce time is in most cases 0.07-0.08sec (from the server in the same colocation), when it grows above 0.3s my cell rings
Here you can see a fresh example of the internal counter speed (1000 hits stats per each Apache child before the proxy stage)
[Sun Aug 1 19:49:45 2004] [notice] Child 3153 stats:
0.01 0.02 0.03 0.04 0.05 0.06 0.07 0.08
99 749 98 33 10 4 6 1
[Sun Aug 1 19:49:47 2004] [notice] Child 3162 stats:
0.01 0.02 0.03 0.04 0.05 0.06 0.07 0.08 0.09
88 720 123 39 16 5 7 1 1
(1st line is timing in sec, 2nd line - number of hits)
Well, guys, I'm just a leader programmer of the project, and may be we're not the very best counter out there (please, let me know if we're not). I just want to say, IMHO it's not all bad in using counters.
Thanks!
Mike Blazer
Programmer at MasterStats.com