Question:

Hi – just wanted to let you know that a particular limitation in your hit counter setup caused me to use someone else’s counter. I use to use yours and would have liked to continue but, at some point my Free-Counters account got corrupted and the counter data was lost.

However, I knew that the hit count was somewhere around 200,000 so I planned to simply generate new counter code through your site and select 200,000 as the starting point. THAT’S where you have a limitation. You only allow up to five (5) digits for a start count…. which means anything over 99,999 isn’t accepted. So anyone who wants to resume a lost count of 6 digits or more can’t use your counter. In fact, the company which provided my hit counter until only days ago seems to have vanished from the face of the earth so I was forced, once again (this about the 5th time), to seek out a new hit counter. And once again I found your web site and liked what I saw and planned to use your counter again…

and once again I was thwarted by the 5-digit limitation for the start count. If you can change that and increase the start count digits to 6 or even 7 (future consideration), then I’d certainly like to try again. Please let me know if it’s possible.

Thanks Harald

———————————————-

Answer:

Hi Harald
Good point………. and this needs to be on the blog, we also need to make this more transparent to our users on the website.

as you probably know there are many different types of counter on the internet and there are essentially 5 different types of counter on our site and each type of counter was designed to fit an application, some are suitable for face book others for blogger. others can go on a plain HTML website whilst another type can be worked into PHP code, the 5 digit fixed counter you mention pretty much works with anything and has proven to be the most dependable and versatile, that is not to say that any of the other types available are not, the 5 digit one you mention has been with us since 2000 over 12 years so it has more than proven itself.

only the fixed digits image counters are 5 digit counters, the java versions and variants also available on site can have up to 35 digits there is a trade off as some sites do not like java and some browsers reject java too, does your application strictly require a fixed image counter? if you let me know which counter you like the design of i will check to see if there is a Java equivalent on site if you can use or we can quite easily create one as part of our portfolio.

this has given me an idea for another page on the site and due to your question i will also put it on a list of upgrades to the fixed image type of counter however this will take longer to implement due to the amount of work and requests we already have.

in the interim I also have another suggestion which is a workaround that some of our users have adopted recently and that is to simply make the 6th and 7th digit fixed on your site, i.e. to make the sequence 100000, cut an image from the counter for the 1 and put it as a fixed HTML image on your site and then put our counter next to it, when the counter reaches 99999, change the image on your site to a 2 and so on, it would have the same temporary effect whilst we get chance to upgrade that version, dependent on which counter you have chosen there may already be individual images i can point you to.

i.e.

to incorporate it into your website and then your counter code after it.

http://free-counters.co.uk/images/Counter/Digits/cold/3.gif

you then only ever need to change the number of the *Giff image when the counter increments past 99999, I know this is not perfect but it will get you by for the next X time, there have been a lot of changes on the internet in the last 4 years and i hope to get to a point in the near future where we can upgrade these to follow existing trends.

let me know what helps……
Paul