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Mea culpa - Distinct Hosts Site Stats Calculation Method…
 
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john
Site Admin


Joined: 16 Mar 2004
Posts: 3434

PostPosted: Wed Jan 11, 2006 10:53 am    Post subject: Mea culpa - Distinct Hosts Site Stats Calculation Method… Reply with quote

We're sorry, and thank you.

We're sorry because we were wrong, many of you expressed your opinion that the reporting of Distinct Hosts seemed a little off. You were right.

Many of you pointed out the difference that third party stats services showed for the the number of Distinct Hosts (an approximation of the number of visitors) to your weblog. While it is still true that since third party stats services are a not a party to transactions involving spammers, search engine crawlers and robots, or your RSS (XML) files, these services will always underreport your blog stats and often by a significant percentage depending on the nature of your visitors, there was in fact an error in the algorithm we used to calculate the number of Distinct Hosts which caused our system to overreport this metric.

We've corrected this algorithm and as a result some publishers will see a decrease in the number of Distinct Hosts going forward. This fix is not retroactive, so past stats will not be updated.

This issue did not cause us to overreport your bandwidth stats, as those were tallied using a different algorithm which is not related to this calculation.

We're very sorry for the error, and we thank you all for your persistence and patience on this issue and for your continued support of our service.
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JC



Joined: 19 Nov 2004
Posts: 29

PostPosted: Mon Jan 30, 2006 5:43 pm    Post subject: Any luck in in separating out other stats Reply with quote

Specifically - "spammers, search engine crawlers and robots", and making them a separate column, as opposed to valid xml requests.

Thanks
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john
Site Admin


Joined: 16 Mar 2004
Posts: 3434

PostPosted: Mon Jan 30, 2006 6:26 pm    Post subject: Re: Any luck in in separating out other stats Reply with quote

Not exactly sure what the question or request is here; but I will try to respond to what I think you're saying, please follow up if you were making a different point.

Yes, we break down accesses to your site as either accesses to your HTML or accesses to your XML files in the General Summary area. In that area, we're trying to give you a quick summary of the amount of access by file type; that's not where we're trying to break down what browser types visited your site...

To try and learn how many visits came to your site from search engine crawlers, look at the Browser Summary. Search engine crawlers may or may not identify themselves as such, though the legitimate ones will. You'll see broswers listed in your Browser Summary like Googlebot, Yahoo! Slurp, Bloglines, msnbot and so on; these are search engine crawlers/robots.

Our system does not total up "access by suspected search engine agents", but we'll assume that you're requesting such a category and will add this to our feature request list.
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