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Comment by ig1 | Hacker News Reader

Do you not think the page view stats are completely misleading your users ?

There's absolutely no indication on Posterous that bots are likely responsible for thousands of the page views shown (which given the long tail nature of Posterous I imagine we're talking about the majority of the page views here for a lot of users).

One user even reported that GA was showing 14 visitors while Posterous was showing 9316:

http://adamriggins.com/posterous-post-views-and-google-analy...

Whenever Posterous has given a response the focus has been on disabled javascript, etc. rather than the fact most of these views are likely generated by bots. For example the email you sent to the user here:

http://www.creativenotice.com/how-posterous-stats-work

Given the values are essentially meaningless why show them to your users at all ?

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Also I imagine you're going to get a very large negative response when you switch to a working method that's going to be along the lines of "where have all my visitors gone".

By talking about "deeper insight" rather than just openly admitting the data is just bad you're just delaying the inevitable backlash.

A few weeks ago we had some bugs in new batch processing code that caused some major errors there. These bugs have since been fixed. We are definitely not as far off as 9316 vs 14 in normal operation.

These numbers are far from meaningless. At the end of the day the numbers reflect what our servers see -- they track something different from Google Analytics but they are useful as a simple ballpark for how interesting or visited your blog post was. Also, they're realtime, which GA does not provide.

Real time or not. Misleading numbers are misleading. Being real-time is no 'cover-up' for a misleading data.As far as 'simple ballpark for how interesting or visited your blog post' is concerned. If a bit visited me a 1000 time and just 100 people read it, that doesn't make it interesting. Reporting bots is seriously no use.

You're avoiding the question about misleading your users.

If the majority of page views are generates by bots then the number of page views you show isn't even a ballpark figure indicating how interesting/visited the blog post is. It's simply a semi-random number depending on crawlers/bot activity and nothing to do with real human visitors.

If you were simply off by 10% I could accept your answer, but you seem to be regularly off by a factor 200-300%.

Just in case there was any doubt about Posterous not filtering out bots given that Garry hasn't specifically admitted it:

http://twitter.com/#!/richiepear/status/13809170130149376

  Rich Pearson (VP Marketing - Posterous)
  @imranghory No - we just don't filter out your own views 
  and search engine visits

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