KarenJ said:
Hands up the Mac and Safari user
Heard that 80% of statistics were made up anyway
Happy New year and all that!
Me probably. Use it most of the time on the Mac, other than that i use Firefox on the PC.
Still waiting to see if Apple will release Safari the PC
Stats maybe made up in other places, I wouldn't know
but we don't manufacture our figures, they are what they are, hence why we've just had to spend a load of dosh, to make sure it doesn't fold in on itself.
We also seperate all hits and views made by search engine robots etc, non of the figures above include the robots etc that commonly hit webpages, our stats system, filters those out to give us a more acurate figure of bandwidth and server usage.
An example of how figures can be fiddled on a forum, is the most users online feature, which is temporarily disabled at the moment, due to reducing server loads etc, but that can be fidddled, by increasing the delay on the cookie that activates when a member visits the forum.
For example, you visit the forum, cookie is set to 30mins, but your only on for 5 mins, then log off. According to the software, your still on the forum, even though your long gone.
Set that to several hours, and then you see how easy it is to have most users online in a period of time. The best method is taking an average of user activity over a period of time, like ive done above, weekdays we average over 900 a day, and weekends around 700.
Even though last year we saw over a thousand online during a day, the actual best figure for users onlien at anyone time, ie that the cookie saw in one cycle was.
909 (30-06-2005 13:41)