Built in Counter

[Shades]

I'm trying to get the built in counter to work, the one already listed in the Control Panal. It makes the counter, but it doesn't seem to be keeping track of the actualy number of hits. Even after I hit the page a lot, it's still just at one. And if I load it on my roomate's computer, it still just reads one. Is the control panal just a front end, and I need to go get my own counter cgi, or what?

[don5408]

Hi. FYI for whatever it's worth the HR counter seems to function as designed on my account.

Have you tried using the edit/reset option at the bottom of the Counter page in Control Panel? Try typing the name of your counter (don't include the .dat extension) and resetting it to 0. You might also want to try entering a number (ex: 101), click on commit changes and check the page which you have the counter on to see if the counter has been updated there.

Either way if HR's counter doesn't seem to want to cooperate with you I wouldn't waste a whole lot of time on it as there are a million and one counter scripts out there to be had.

Good luck!
Don

[Shades]

Well, weird. Now it seems to be counting up reliably, and there's a new folder "stat" in the public_html folder. Where would the counter be located? I don't see any files with a .dat extension when I FTP in.

[don5408]

"Now it seems to be counting up reliably"

Good deal, glad to hear it decided to cooperate!

"there's a new folder "stat" in the public_html folder"

Those are your Webalizer stats (also accessable via the "Statistics Page" link in Control Panel), those are based on the server access logs and are maintained whether you use the hit counter(s) or not.

"Where would the counter be located? I don't see any files with a .dat extension when I FTP in."

The counter script and associated .dat files are stored in the cgi-sys directory. The cgi-sys folder is a shared directory which is used to store the preconfigured scripts (FormMail, guestbook etc) which HR provides with all accounts. Due to the way it's setup you wont see the cgi-sys folder via an FTP client or the File Manager in Control Panel, nor can you modify the files in the cgi-sys folder directly (other than using the Edit/Reset option to reset or change the value of your counter files).

Note that you can create separate counters on multiple pages by specifying different counter names.

Best wishes
Don

[Shades]

The counter doesn't seem to be very accurate or responsive- I changed it's count manually about an hour ago, still doesn't show up differently. Also, it doesn't seem to be very accurate maybe. It logged about 800 hits, but the weblog says there has been 2300 page requests. That counter is on every page, so it seems that it should have gone up 2300 times. Is the counter that bad, am I interpretting the lof wrong, and what counter alternatices are there?