The counter service is changing to provide more facilities in each account plus you can have more than one counter in each account, to do this shortly you will see an upgrade button appear in your old admin panel.


You will need to log on to each counter in order to migrate all your counters to one account, of course you can opt to ignore the upgrade but you will not be able to take advantage of all the new functions available including but not limited to regenerating your code for the original counter, changing the counter type dynamically and many more.


Unfortunately if you have lost your username and password to your counter and have not submitted an email address associated with that account you will not be able to upgrade it, we can do this manually for you but it will cost to do this, in this situation we recommend that you create a new account and new counters to suit.


Regards
Paul

Free counters has now been running for 12 years and in that time has seen many changes, at present we are developing a new free counters plugin for wordpress, several revisions are under way of the core software and hardware of the main Free Counters site and servers.

Our aim between today and 2015 is for the new wordpress plugin to be released under the GNU public licence version 2, the new wordpress plugin does not use any of our server resources and therefore does not need to be connected to our servers which keeps our costs down and provides everyone who has a wordpress site to use our free counter offering in this area.

You will have the option to use our server or the MySQL database that comes with wordpress first beta release of version 1.0.0 is underway and although beta will be thoroughly tested our end but we cannot predict every installation until it is out in the world for a while, it will be tested on the latest releases of wordpress.

We hope you enjoy our new distribution.

Regards

Paul

Question by Email:

HAPPY NEW YEAR 2013

I have lost the code for my counter, in a Serve-cleanup, now I can’t come back in on your site to download a new one, it says

The following error took place:
This counter already exists? Please choose another name! LOCAL

– why is that?

I have tried with another name….

Answer:

The reason you got this message is because another user already has registered the counter name that you have chosen, there are millions of users on the servers so any short or obvious names are becoming very scarce, for instance getting a counter with the name mycounter.

Even niche names are getting short, i.e. if you run an image site and call your counter photocount etc. etc.

You can choose to have a randomly generated name by not filling in the name of your counter when you sign up OR add some additional characters to your proposed name i.e. mycounter567.

Hope this helps

Webmaster

Hi EV1
I have just completed several updates to both the servers and counter software, 3 of the existing servers have also been rebuilt with new machines and software, we are pleased if not a little relieved that it is now completed and appears to be running satisfactorily, if however anyone has any problems please contact me.

As in all software and major upgrades like this there is a Beta stage which is now in operation, so we do expect a couple of bugs but we are fairly confident these will only be a few minor tweaks.

We have also refreshed the statistical database so some of you may only have statistics started over the last few days regardless of how long you have had the counter, this was due to corruption on one of the servers hard disks, we have retrieved as much information as possible and most of you should not notice much difference other than the speed of your free counters on the new ultra-fast servers.

Unfortunately if you have been unlucky and your statistics were on a bad sector of the old server there is nothing we can do to recover them.
Regards
Paul

Question: do I need to update my counter code on my page?

Answer: No, the updates will use the same code and is backwards compatible with the new upgrade.

We are still upgrading in the background, several issues have come into play with the change to 64 bit operating systems and our counter software which was originally designed for 32 bit, the statistics will continue to be offline on our older counters but they are all still running in the background.

new counters are not affected by this because they are still on the older servers and this only effects servers 006/007/008.

We are working hard to upgrade and implement new changes ASAP.

Regards
Paulgee

we are actively looking into this issue, we have recently upgraded servers to newer machines with updated operating systems, this has raised other issues and conflicts with the original counter software, in order not to slow the server down and in order to keep all the counters working we have had to switch off the statistics part of the program temporarily.

This is an on-going problem with browser changes, i.e. updates and security settings and also third party cookies being an issue now.

We will update this issue on the website in due course.
Regards
Paul