Oolite Bulletins

I installed The Webaliser on hope.alioth.net and set it up to gather the usage stats for the Elite Wiki. The interesting thing is the hourly stats. Either Elite has a big world wide appeal, or Elite players never sleep

http://wiki.alioth.net/stats

or the 'crawlers never sleep

How accurate are the page hit counts on a wiki site? I was running a wiki from my site at one point, and it was registering 25% of my entire site's traffic, but I never once advertised it on a big scale, and no visitors ever registered or contributed.

Any idea how it serves pages? Does a page build by referencing other pages in the wiki folder, so maybe ghost hits are recorded due to other (maybe <!--#include ) pages being accessed?

would the stats be affected by RSS feeds? don't they go off all the time?

Page counts won't be that accurate for a wiki (because there are very few actual 'pages' - it's mostly just 'index.php'). I think Webalizer counts a 'hit' as any discrete response from the web server, from 404 errors to little png decorations (i.e. one hit = one line in access.log). The 'hits' statistic is largely irrelevant.

It's the visits statistic that's actually important. The Webalizer does try to figure out what consititues a discrete visit. The 'visits' number (a couple of hundred a day on average - subtract about 10 a day for web crawlers) seems reasonable enough given that the site is about all things Elite, and that Oolite has had quite a lot of downloads.

Can't you run a browser report? Most legitimate search engines identify themselves as such ("Googlebot", "Slurb", "Scooter", "wget", etc). I used to run Analog on a site a few years back, and with that, you could actively filter those 'browsers' out, when producing your statistics.

Not yet - the user agent isn't in the log files.