Website Statistics (Internal Document)

Main site statistics

BSMS statistics

Moving History statistics

Site stats are provided by Analog. You can find an explanation of the basic reports at http://www.analog.cx/docs/reports.html

Problems inherent with web server statistics

Caching, the process of providing local copies of a 'web file', is a technique used to reduce the amount of extra traffic over a computer network and almost all web service providers provide some degree of caching on their servers. The cache reduces the number of hits made on the remote server and thus reduces the number of hits measured by the statistics software.

Web usage statistics programs, such as those used by the University of Brighton, cannot therefore be used to make strong inferences about the number of people who have read a website or webpage. Although those who compile these statistics usually try to make this clear, people still insist on misusing them to make overly strong inferences.

What can be deduced from the stats is the minimum number of pages of information which the web server delivered. It can also be used to provide an estimate of the relative popularity of pages or directories of information.