You are here200+ Reads ? For an Aku post ??
200+ Reads ? For an Aku post ??
So, people were complaining that the Read Stats were a bit huge recently.
Believe it or not, these were legit. The admins have access to a "Track" tab for each page that details all the IPs and accounts that access a page and the time-stamp. The Read Stats were not lying.
So, what happened ? Are we on Slashdot everyday ??
No, a quick verification of the IPs that immediately access any new posting shows us that webcrawlers are the main culprit. We must have passed some weird threshold on Google or Yahoo and they started indexing all of our content. That's not very surprising since we have been in operation 2+ years and now have thousands of posts on the site. That makes us a veteran site.
What seems to have happened recently is that a multitude of other crawlers have now started to index our site. After 5 minutes I notice at least 6. Those who track these things indicate that there are currently about 300+ crawlers that may slurp a site. Since I imagine that the lower-order crawlers probably look to Google to figure out who is important enough to add to their crawl-list, we may have crossed a threshold there as well.
We need to ignore crawlers in our Read Stats. In comes Drupal's Advanced Statistics Module.
I've now installed that module and checked on the "Do not log visits from search engines and crawlers". Let's see how the stats look starting at 10:15am today.
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- 695 reads
I am honoured...
Although the stats are not lying, they are most likely tracking types of hits the previous stats didn't track. My theory is things like adding a comment (like this one) is getting tracked as a hit. It's just a guess, but something isn't right because the counts are going up too fast across the board. Maybe it is in fact more accurate, but it renders our previous stats irrelevant.
Feel free to tell my I'm wrong, but it seems that way at least.
You are correct in saying that comment reads count as article reads, but that was the case before as well. I even specifically tested it when we were doing our yearly stats article. As an admin, you have access to the "Track" tab. You can investigate this as well as me. Have fun.
Some hits are immediately made after a new comment or a new article. There are 12 Twitter followers for Herdofcatsdotca.
Since the tweets include a link, I think some of the followers are accessing/crawling the entry immediately.
Methinks we should trim down the Twitter followers for now ...
It just plays to my theory that Twitter is evil.