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Q: Please Help! My Counter is Not Counting When I Refresh My Browser? and/or
Appears As If it Is Counting All Over The Place?
A: Be sure you are not looking at an old impression of your counter within the cache of your browser, browsers have a directory called a cache and this collects and downloads all the files to do with a website when you visit it, the reason your browser does this is so it does not have to keep downloading the same repeat information so when you revisit a site it loads faster into the browser itself from the files on your machine instead of the Internet website itself.
Have you ever wondered why the first time you visit a site it's slow to load and after that it seems to be instantly there when you go back "that's your cache at work" problem here is the browser relies on time stamps and dates when the pages are created sometimes before it starts downloading any information again, Netscape 4.7 is a big one on this it will persist just loading past information from your cache even if you press refresh.
This can be and is a problem with interactive pages because whilst all this is going on the little graphic or text you are seeing on your counter may or may not be a count from your browser cache or a past visit or reload and/or refresh of your browser, you can alter the settings of most browsers to help prevent or even stop this from happening and will be in your browser help files but obviously may appear as a fault with the counter when actually it's your browser cache at work.
!!! If you want help on clearing your cache Go Here....
Additional information.
Q: Does This Effect Everyone's Browser and Will it Affect The Counter At All?....
Everyone's browser is the same dependent on how they have it set up and also which Browser they are using at the time, there are a lot more than just one or two different types of browser the most popular are Internet Explorer then Netscape and AOL, when the user first visits your site and the browser loads for the very first time they will receive a fresh number that they can see and 80% of users every time they refresh the same screen......... but the other 20% usually will see the same number from their cache that they loaded earlier and there is no easy or simple way of getting around this really as every browser and every user are not the same, other than getting all your visitors to read this tutorial and learning how to change all their settings :~(......
The World Wide Web Consortium lays down certain standards and rules that most should follow in order to keep some sort of consistency so that everyone can view and use the Internet in a similar way and helps prevent scenarios like not being able to view a WebPage because of it's format, we always try to adhere to these standards and practices so you "our visitor" no matter what platform or what browser they are using can still see our web pages as we initially intended (with minimal differences) and not try to convince them that our site is better viewed in blah-blah..... or another way because what is right for one is not right necessarily right for another these standards are not always adhered to and sometimes very difficult to and so you will always get "until it sinks in" problems between one browser and another....... |
BUT..................... after saying all that this does not effect the operation of the counter itself because the piece of code within the counter literally calls a program on our server it has no other option other than to do this , when it does it records the hit just the same but usually as a reload of the same page/user within your statistics and the actual number supplied to the browser by the program will be one digit higher than the previous count even although the browser may decide in it's wisdom not to display it, additionally will still record the same information as a hit.....
Finally it goes without saying if you are positive it is not your cache please do not hesitate to contact us so we can look into it for you....
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