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Comment by rantfoil | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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.

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