Could you count hits on the server when serving the page?

I guess caching might break that depending on cache settings. And for SPAs, it might not work as desired.

dspillett 5 days ago | parent | next [-]

Calling out as the page closes, assuming you called out at out listed too, tells you how long the user was there. Not entirely reliable of course as they could have opened it in the background so had it open a while before dismissing it without looking at it at all.

	▲	Thorrez 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		I should have been clearer. I was replying to the "I use the beacon API in my homebuilt hit-counter." part.

▲

AndrewStephens 5 days ago | parent | prev [-]

There are several reasons that you cannot just count the number of times your server has served the page.

The biggest is bots - on my site (and I assume most others), legitimate requests are far, far outweighed by bots. Sometimes you can tell that they are bots but it is very common for bots to pretend to be real users. Oftentimes you can't tell from a single request but only but looking at the pattern of requests.

Some bots do take the trouble of running scripts on the page but thankfully they are in the minority so far.

Caching would certainly break the system as well, in the other direction.

▲

immibis 5 days ago | parent [-]

Why do we automatically suppose that bot requests are "not legitimate" btw?

▲

wredcoll 5 days ago | parent [-]

For the same reason we assume a random tiger wants to eat us.

	▲	meindnoch 4 days ago \| parent [-]
		That's tigrophobic.