How are hits counted?
Originally we simply counted the hits to the first chapter of a story. Whilst a true count of the “hits” it over-stated the actual number of people reading the story, particularly for multi-chapter stories. Around Christmas 2005, we introduced a more complex algorithm to estimate the actual number of chapters read, so for example repeatedly refreshing the same chapter won’t increase the number of hits, whereas following a link from an email directly to chapter 5 would. We also began discounting hits from the author and from known robots such as Google & Yahoo’s bots indexing the site. In July 2006 this was further refined by allowing stories to be cached in the reader’s temporary Internet files, so if you read a chapter and come back the next day to read it again, as long as your machine hasn’t run out of space in temporary Internet files, the second visit will not count as a hit as the story is not downloaded from the server a second time. This also reduces our bandwidth usage. The ne
