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Buggy download counter

Posted: Thu Dec 08, 2022 7:01 pm
by Pi-C
The download counter on the mod portal seems to be wrong. At least for one of my mods, the total count is far less than the number of downloads for just the last version of the mod:
downloads.png
downloads.png (41.1 KiB) Viewed 1283 times
But looking at some other random mods from "Recently updated", it seems to be a general problem that the numbers don't add up correctly. Any idea what may have happened there?

Re: Buggy download counter

Posted: Thu Dec 08, 2022 9:05 pm
by vinzenz
Yeah I need to put more clarification around these numbers. The number on the mod page is "count of people who have downloaded this mod since Nov 2021", the previous number was heavily bloated by download scripts where every individual download got counted. The download counter for releases is now also counting only unique users downloading this mods. So releases before Nov 2021 tend to have larger numbers than newer releases or even the new total mod download count.

Btw I archived the old download count and it will probably show up in another form again.

Re: Buggy download counter

Posted: Fri Dec 09, 2022 9:30 am
by Pi-C
Thanks for the explanation!
vinzenz wrote: Thu Dec 08, 2022 9:05 pm Yeah I need to put more clarification around these numbers. The number on the mod page is "count of people who have downloaded this mod since Nov 2021", the previous number was heavily bloated by download scripts where every individual download got counted. The download counter for releases is now also counting only unique users downloading this mods. So releases before Nov 2021 tend to have larger numbers than newer releases or even the new total mod download count.
Ah, yes, November 2021! I've seen the note about it on the "Metrics" tab. Something like this definitely should also be next to the total download count -- without it, the numbers make no sense, and it would be less confusing if the total wasn't shown at all.
Btw I archived the old download count and it will probably show up in another form again.
OK, I'm looking forward to that … :-)

Re: Buggy download counter

Posted: Fri Dec 09, 2022 8:46 pm
by Anachrony
I think this is a good change. Sorting by most downloaded is far more usable now without so much bias toward inflated numbers from when downloads were counted differently. The most downloaded mods are mostly things that I hear people talking about and see them actually using, rather than things from years ago that somehow have hundreds of thousands of downloads but are rarely used. Was a bit of a shock to see such a big drop all of a sudden, but when I saw the numbers were down for everything it became clear what the change was.