[wordpress] stats broken – proof

[Latest, as of 10^th June, just a few hours after posting: Oops, while the stats probably are somewhat broken, this purported “proof” is a mis-interpretation (and that could apply also to my earlier observation): the stats main page only shows the 10 most viewed pages. Argh. Is it better to add a comment like this, showing off my rush-to-conclusions error to all readers, or to silently delete the posting? I left the posting in place. In a way, my eror ilustrats my point that its extremely easy to make errors, especially based on invalid assumptions!]

In my earlier posting “wordpress: broken stats?” I conjectured that the WordPress number-of-views-of-your-blog stats are broken. I then found an instance where the number of views of a posting decreased from 1 to 0 (within the same day), but that’s a bit difficult to show visually! However, right now the stats of this blog offer self-contradicting information in the same page, so I took a snapshot of the screen:

Advertisement

[wordpress] Broken stats?

It’s official: all modern software is broken. You thought perhaps that it was only on your machine that Thunderbird messes up quoting and gets confused about the number of unread messages, or that Firefox, if left to itself, will gobble up memory like mad, or that Internet Explorer will invite all kinds of malware (I don’t use IE), or that Microsoft Update will bring your machine to its knees, or, the Windows volume control taking one thousand times longer to respond to a click than it should? No, it’s like that everywhere, for all software, it’s just that most people don’t notice, and those who do notice it probably mostly think that it’s something local.

And I think that the WordPress stats, visually impressive as they are :-), are just as broken as most modern software.

Yesterday it reported some 64 views of my blog. This morning, 11 or 12 views or what it was, and it hasn’t changed through the day, for ~12 hours! Similarly, the other dips downward you see in the graph above also corresponded to about 12-hour periods with no traffic at all, which I find hard to believe (I also find the peak at 180-something views on the second day of my blog very hard to believe!). And, for example, according to the stats the steady stream of views yesterday of a certain posting came from nowhere, no referral. And, for that matter, the “featured blog” status in tag “programming” (and how did I get that? I have no idea) apparently generates no traffic at all.

But, again, if it is the case that the stats are broken, then that’s no different from most modern software. I can’t think offhand of any program or programming language implementation that I use that isn’t full of bugs (sometimes I report some particularly annoying bug, but most times I don’t bother: it’s just too much). It boggles the mind.