On Wed, May 20, 2026 at 11:45 PM Suyash Dwivedi via Wikitech-l wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org wrote:
Hi everyone,
I've always been curious about how many people actually visit my Toolforge tools - and I suspect I'm not alone. So I built Toolcounter (https://toolcounter.toolforge.org/), a lightweight, privacy-friendly hit counter designed specifically for Toolforge-hosted tools.
What it tracks
📄 Page views - counted on every page load (including refreshes). Good for total traffic. 👤 Sessions (unique visit approximation) — uses sessionStorage in the visitor's browser. First open in a tab = 1 session. Refresh = not counted again. New tab = counted again. No cookies, no IP, no personal data stored.
Both counts appear separately on the dashboard with a per-day bar chart.
Quick integration (replace YOUR_TOOL and PAGE)
Option 1 - SVG badge (no JS, image only, shows page views):
<img src="https://toolcounter.toolforge.org/badge.php?tool=YOUR_TOOL&page=PAGE" alt="Page views">
Option 2 - JS embed (shows both views + unique sessions): 👁 Views: <span id="tc-views"></span> 👤 Unique: <span id="tc-sessions"></span>
<script src="https://toolcounter.toolforge.org/embed.js.php?tool=YOUR_TOOL&page=PAGE"></script>
An embed code generator is available on the homepage.
Privacy The database stores zero personal data, only anonymous counters per (tool, page) pair. No cookies are set. No IP addresses, User-Agent strings, or usernames are ever written to the database. Full privacy policy: https://toolcounter.toolforge.org/privacy.php
Source code is publicly available and open for audit.
Seeing many flowers bloom is great. There is also a system you can use at https://toolviews.toolforge.org/api/ which attempts to count 2xx status responses ("hits") for all tools by parsing the access logs generated at the Toolforge reverse proxy service. That system does not currently have a nice UI, but it does have data going back to at least 2019 and does not require inserting tracking tokens in your pages.
Bryan