On 8/30/06, Steve Summit scs@eskimo.com wrote:
Well, no, not just "anyone". :-)
Anyone *could*. Most people just wouldn't know *how*.
I would tend to agree. But three people at AOL lost their jobs because of something they honestly thought there was "no harm" in doing. And it's very difficult (if not impossible) to guarantee that something gets kept for only a day.
If it's possible to guarantee it gets kept, it's possible to guarantee it only gets kept for a day.
However, this wouldn't require that, and indeed, a server-side solution would be impossible: 99.9% of page hits won't go to the server to start with.
Not sure what you mean here.
What effect would it have if I reloaded the page fifty times? I wouldn't send fifty messages to the view-logging server instead of one; I would have a 4.88% chance of sending *one* message, rather than a 0.1% chance. The server doesn't know that I reloaded the page fifty times: it just knows that it was told I visited it an *average* of 1000 times (averaging it with non-hits). It can't, therefore, discard the extra 49 page loads; it never received them. The client has to discard them if anyone's going to.
But that would be considerably more work to implement, and would require arbitrary amounts of state kept in the browser, and would break down if the browser were restarted (or perhaps just if the tab or window were closed).
That's not a bug, it's a feature: it shouldn't be the same page hit if I leave and then return. And more work than "impossible" is rather difficult.