Extension:HitCounters/de-formal

The HitCounters extension displays the view count in the page footer and the most viewed pages on a special page called PopularPages. The extension provides page views statistics that were removed in MediaWiki 1.25.

Benefits
This extension provides feedback in the form of audience measurement to editors. Knowing the rough size of one's audience as an editor allows editors to identify and improve popular articles. HitCounters' special page PopularPages also allows editors to focus on improving those articles with the highest traffic, and helps readers discover a project's most curated content.

HitCounters extension enables determining the wikiFactor, a rough measure of a wiki website's popularity.

HitCounters extension is minimally intrusive with respect to data security and privacy concerns. The extension handles metrics on the server side so aggregated data stays within the site's security boundary. The extension does not inject JavaScript to be executed by the client, and does not ask a client to download additional un-audited code from a third party, like GoogleAnalyticsMetrics.

The extension does not track users who visit a page. As such, there's no need for special handling of Do Not Track browser requests or Global Privacy Control settings. The extension also does not use third party services, like GoogleAnalyticsMetrics.

The extension does not have dependencies which can cause conflicts. Other extensions, like GoogleAnalyticsMetrics, can cause problems during a Composer update. Also see Phabricator P6481.

Differences from core MediaWiki implementation
Before MediaWiki 1.25, the page views counting functionality was in core MediaWiki. This extension is based on that same code, but was deliberately done in a more lightweight way in order to speed up processing time. Many lines of superfluous code were removed. Also, the old MediaWiki core code did numerous database queries on every page hit; these have all been removed as well. This change may possibly lead to some inaccuracies in the data.

The core differences that wiki administrators need to know are:
 * The hit counts are stored in cache.
 * The visible hit count at the bottom of each page is updated only once per day. (Pages with hit count less than 100 are updated once per minute.)
 * If you refresh your browser on a wiki page, that hit is ignored.

What counts as view
According to tests conducted by several MediaWiki operators, a view is counted if a page is accessed normally, as well as  and when accessing a page revision.

A view is not counted with the other actions, such as,  , and.

Installation
You can use composer to install this extension by running the following two commands in your MediaWiki directory:

$ COMPOSER=composer.local.json composer require --no-update mediawiki/hit-counters $ composer update

Migration from before MediaWiki 1.25

Configuration

 * When set to, it disables the notice in the pages footer saying "" as well as the special page  . This configuration parameter was removed with MediaWiki 1.35.0.
 * Sets how often page counters should be updated. Default value is.
 * Sets how often page counters should be updated. Default value is.
 * Sets how often page counters should be updated. Default value is.

Fork
There is a fork of this extension with extended backward compatibility available:
 * Version 0.3.2 of this extension's fork is backward compatible to MediaWiki 1.25.x.
 * Version 0.3.3 of this extension's fork is backward compatible to MediaWiki 1.25.x.