Runaway stats?

riffmax · October 30, 2011

Typically, I have views that range from single digits to several hundred. Yesterday, I logged 4984 views. That doesn't seem possible. Any input?

rainforest1155 · October 30, 2011

On the internet it's easy for a site or gallery to go viral and generate tons of views out of a sudden. All it takes is a photo embedded or linked to from a popular blog, forum or other site.
That said, 5000 views are not much and could have been done by a few people leaving any slideshow on your site running for a prolonged period of time. Maybe you have a homepage slideshow and a visitor opened it up and then forgot to close the browser window leaving it running for many hours? That easily adds up.

If you have further questions, post some details, like a link to the gallery or site in question. If you don't want to share details here, you could email our helpdesk:
http://help.smugmug.com/

riffmax · October 30, 2011

Thanks for the reply. I can see where that could be the case if it were one or 2 galleries, but it seems to be site-wide. It's not one specific gallery and also includes galleries that are password protected with only one person that has access, or galleries that are unlisted. My main site is here
http://perryphoto.smugmug.com/

One of the protected galleries is this one - it's a year-old gallery for one individual - it has 24 views yesterday.
http://perryphoto.smugmug.com/Photography/Neve-Myburgh-White-Fences/15134310_7jbSFZ

One of the unlisted galleries is this one - I used it to back up some files I had on an old computer. It only had 2 views yesterday, but there shouldn't have been any
http://perryphoto.smugmug.com/Other/Backup/15819297_G5dfC2

I have 13 other galleries that had anywhere from 100-600 views - some of them from events that are over 2 years ago, which is highly unlikely that anyone would be viewing them at this point anyway.

Thanks again.

riffmax · October 31, 2011

Interestingly, today, the total views for 10/29 now shows 4396. Why would that have changed?

rainforest1155 · October 31, 2011

The one individual may have passed out the link and password to others. Or they simply viewed the photos again.

As for the backup gallery, you might have embedded a photo on another site that was visited by someone just now.

Also note that we only do not track your own views if you're logged in as the account owner. If you ever visit your site or a gallery from a browser that's not logged in or in visitor view, views would be recorded.

If you wish to learn more on where visitors come from, you could add an external tracking service, like google analytics. Read more on it in the 'double your stats power' section here:
http://help.smugmug.com/customer/portal/articles/93330-viewing-stats
Keep in mind that external services can only track visits to your pages and do not keep track of photos that are embedded in some other page, like a blog or forums.

As a final note, now that you added a link to your backup gallery in a public forum, you'll likely get more visits to it. If you don't want that, I recommend removing that link again or setting a password on the gallery.

I didn't check your stats yesterday and can't say what it said for the 29th. It might be that the stats were temporarily affected by yesterdays issue and only updated completely after the issue was resolved.

Runaway stats?

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