Erratic Hit Counters?

[pikman]

Anyone here know about any problems with Yahoo hosted hit counters?

I've been using Yahoo Small Business Web Hosting for a few years now. When I originally set my site up in 2004, I also put some of their Add-Ons Counters into some of my web pages. Note they also have full site statistics that I also activated and seems to work fine. The problem has been that the counters have always been erratic. Their configuration function for that add-on allows a considerable variation in counter display parameters including setting the displayed count numbers. One adds this tag into their html file. Accessing the below gif directly shows their default counter shape just happens to be large and goofy looking:

<IMG SRC=http://visit.webhosting.yahoo.com/counter.gif ALT="Counter">

I'd imagine when an a person accesses one of my pages, this counter sends packets back to Yahoo that increment their statistical counter database then update an entry within my site's statistics memory and returns with an update number including the correct looking counter gif to my site. What happens is I often receive a bogus count typically empty 00000 displayed by the goofy looking default counter. Sometimes repetedly accessing the page a few times finally coughs up the real number and counter shapes. That shows their database really has the correct data but somehow the packet transfer went bad and maybe after a few handshakes, they just passed in the default goofy counter at 00000. Thus at times it may be due to bandwidth issues at their host server. If I go back and try and reconfigure a counter that showed 00000, itmay show all the correct data that tells me it was some kind of packet or software bug.

However at other times a counter seems to go to the default shape and permanently changes. If I reconfigure some counters, it shows the default counter is really there now. REconfigured, they seem to work fine for a short period afterward. However hours later or the next day most are likely to be bogus. Of course their technical service didn't seem to do anything when I inquired. So what I am asking here is do any of you know anything about such problems? I searched a bit "yahoo web hosting" AND counters but could not find anything. I rather doubt I am the only user with this problem. Since there is not forum for small businesses hosted by their service there could be thousands of us with the same problem and we would not have a clue as to whether the issue is universal. Oh by the way I'm an old test engineer in Silicon Valley. Having to turn off my Yahoo stats and remove all the above counter tags from my 100 plus html files is not something I want to have to waste time doing.

-dave

[pomra]

I haven't heard of that before, have you tried contacting Yahoo support as the host?

[pikman]

Through email. Of course trying to reach a warm body in any of these high tech companies is virtually impossible unless one is a large company with clout. Thus one presents a problem with clarity and receives robot responses that are likely simple software expert systems that filter out key words in a message then respond in some pleasant way and signed by what seems to be a real person. I expected such but gave them the benefit of the doubt. The first time they suggested that, I instead use their site logging tools and that they were working on the problem. I knew how to use the stat stuff from when I originally set my site up and doubted they were working on my counter problems of course. Figured they knew their counters were flaky long ago as considering how simple it ought to be to debug, understand why that is the case. Probably the issue is that they cannot fix the problem without wholy getting rid of that version of counters software. To do so might disrupt and annoy a lot of users that had already incorporated counters onto their sites and they would not want to have to edit and reload their html files. Since most users apparently moved to just using the site logging stat tools that was the first thing the robot suggested I do to. Counters embedded onto web pages are after all hardly useful statistic gathering tools and instead are primitive indications that cannot tell anything more than total visits..

Well I waited a week and given my technical background, more intently observed what was happening. Then sent them information beyond what I wrote in the thread above. Their robot responded that they have now resolved the problem and all is well. ??? So I re-programmed a dozen counters overnight and checked what was occuring over a few hours and then a day later. Of course as people accessed my site counter information would increasingly become bogus. So there was no change and the stupid response shows it was just robot software replying. I responded with a couple more in kind and their responses lost all credibility. I doubt that a warm body ever read anything I submitted. A sad reflection on the state of technical help these days. I'm going to write a sed script to remove all the external Yahoo counter url lines out of my code and then on some rainy day bother to load about 120 html files back up on the server. -dave