Xiaxue's blog counter: real or fake?

Hello everyone, happy new year. There has been so much dirt flung back in the direction of Xiaxue since the war between her and Gushcloud first erupted and whilst Gushcloud's PR response can only be described as an epic fail (or a lesson in what not to do in a crisis), SMRT feedback has dug up a lot more dirt on Xiaxue. Oh dear. Look, I don't wanna take sides in this fight - but I couldn't resist reading this piece entitled, The Xiaxue & Nuffnang Exposé (Part 1.5) and if you're really interested, here's part 1 by the same blogger. It is kinda long, but I am going to tackle just one aspect of the claims in that piece: Xiaxue's blog counter. Now I am not an IT expert, so I hope to make these IT issues more accessible to ordinary folks like myself! As I had an IT expert sitting right next to me, I pointed out the following to my IT expert from this piece which claimed:

"Firstly, the stats counter seems to be rigged to increase +1 per second. Any web developer will be able to tell you that, based on Javascript coding that was used to deliver that function."

Then there was a counter claim on this website which seems to justify Xiaxue's claim that her counter is not rigged. Please feel free to visit this link here to hear the other side of the story (written by a Xiaxue supporter no doubt).

The SMRT Feedback's response to that Tumblr link was the following:

"View page source? Really? We said, take a look at the Javascript coding. View page source means you are looking at the HTML coding lah goondu. To view the Javascript, you have to right-click on your browser and go “Inspect Element“. Let’s not get all technical. They won’t understand anyways."

Now I was hoping for a more technical answer beyond Javascript vs "view page source" - but never mind, I have my own IT helpdesk/expert at hand. So I got him to look at both sides of the story as well as the "view page source" for Xiaxue's web counter. He gave me a very low-tech answer and an easy way for all of you to test Xiaxue's blog counter and understand the nature of the technology that runs such counters. Here are a few easy steps for you to follow: 

1. Load Xiaxue's blog onto your browser by clicking on this link for her famous blog. 

2. Scroll down to her blog counter by pressing page down a few times: I found it on the right hand toolbar, below an ad for Curash Baby Care and Tyrequeen. Look for the words 'Visitors Past Week' - there you have a very active counter that keeps ticking away. 

3. Disabled your internet from your laptop, mobile phone or tablet device; that means cutting your Wifi connection so that you are taking your device completely offline. 

4. Try to open a new window and connect to another website like Facebook and check that you are offline and unable to connect. Confirm that your device is completely offline at this stage. 

5. Go back to Xiaxue's blog page and look at the counter - if your device is offline at this stage, the counter should have stopped as this should be feeding you real time information through the internet. If the counter is rigged, then the counter will continue to tick, despite the fact that your device is now offline and no longer connected to the internet. 

Now I tried this several times to confirm this on difference devices (laptops, tablet devices, mobile phones) and can confirm that even after I turned disconnected the WIFI connection, the counter continued ticking. So yes, her counter is rigged as it is ticking away despite being offline. Don't take my word for it - try the experiment yourself, it should take no more than one minute to do it on your laptop and a few minutes to repeat it on a range of different devices you have around you. If you have a friend near you, get your friend to try the same experiment as well - see for yourself if her counter is rigged of not. I then turned back to my IT expert and asked for an explanation to see if Xiaxue (and/or her IT team) did tamper with the counter or if she is innocent of any kind of dishonesty when it comes to using such a counter on her blog. After all, in her counterargument presented here, ThemissingA's defence reads as follows: 

Xiaxue on the warpath.

1. Xiaxue did not create the coding for her counter. It was supplied to her by blogger.com, which is owned by Google Inc.

2. Blogger.com (and, by extension, Google) supplies this widget to ALL of its bloggers.

3. If the counter is rigged, that rests entirely on the shoulders of GOOGLE, NOT XIAXUE. It also means that ANYONE using blogger (which, if I’m not wrong, comprises of the majority of Singapore’s blogging community) is also at fault for “rigging” their counters.

So what is going on here? My IT expert looked at the coding for the counter and this is his (not mine) expert opinion. "This is a far more complex situation than ThemissingA tries to make it out to be and to try to summarize it in a nutshell, well, it's not easy to prove beyond a shadow of doubt that Xiaxue is not guilty of tampering with that counter - though in all probability, that is the case. She doesn't need to - she has a great blog that generates plenty of traffic. There is clearly some Nuffnang stuff in here as there's a lot of advertising thrown in there. If you have adblock enabled for her page, then it does block out a lot of that Nuffnang advertising thrown at you. It would take me days to try to pull this thing apart to see which bits of code are from Nuffnang and which bits are from Google - such is the nature of very complex websites and I can't say for sure 100% if her counter has been tampered with or not, not for now anyway."

There is so much advertising on Xiaxue's blog.

We then tried the same experiment on my blog (since Limpeh's blog is on Blogger as well) and then we repeated the experiment after we had loaded a similar counter onto my blog. We then went offline and waited to see if the numbers moved - they did, even after we disabled the WIFI. My IT expert then offered the following explanation, "This is not a completely dishonest way to do such a counter - it merely saves bandwidth. As we load the page and the counter, it picks up two pieces of information: how many hits your page has had so far and at what rate your blog has been picking up views. It then works out at what rate the views come in and then the counter ticks away at that rate rather than rely on trying to update itself in real time, receiving that information online. This saves a lot of bandwidth and it is done by most counters. Does this yield an accurate result? Actually, yes - as long as the rate you receive your traffic is fairly constant and not subject to big fluctuations, it yields decent results. Is it dishonest? Well, as long as we are understand how this technology works, we take the results with a pinch of salt: it is an approximation, not an exact figure. The figure is precise and accurate at the moment you load the page, after that, the logarithm takes over and makes a prediction. This explains why the counter still works when you take the page completely offline." 

My IT expert then looked at the codes on my blog page (after I had loaded a similar counter onto my blog just for comparison) and the counter on Xiaxue's blog. This was what he had to say, "I find it troubling that the two counters seem to look very similar yet still have some differences - the technology, the design behind the counter is more or less the same, the same way any two microwave ovens would rely on the same basic science to cook your food. However, once you look at the details on the code, they are not the same - but why should they be? Two microwave ovens can rely on the same technology yet have subtle differences when it comes to the way they are designed and built. The fact is Blogger users can add a range of gadgets onto their blog - there are 28 basic ones and 906 gadgets contributed to Google by third party developers. Some of these 906 gadgets are downright silly (Daily Cute Puppy, Hot Models), others actually quite useful. And if none of these 906 gadgets take your fancy, there is still the option to add your own gadget to your blog from an external website. Therefore, I doubt that Xiaxue's blog counter is directly supplied by Google/Blogger once you look at the detail of the code - not that it really matters anyway, IMHO." 

I then pursued the discussion with my IT expert. Now that we have understood the technology behind the way such counters work, I can now see why her counter would go on ticking even when my laptop is offline. Why would she (and her supporters) then claim that her counter was supplied by Google/Blogger, when upon closer inspection, it is not? It is similar because it uses the same technology that runs such counters, but it is not identical to the one supplied by Google/Blogger - though it could have been made available to her via Blogger's platform through one of their many third party developers. Why did she make such a claim then - as it would clearly undermine her stance if it was exposed that she lied about the source of her counter? Was she simply careless in terms of which one of her supporters' she endorsed? Xiaxue, just because someone is on your side doesn't mean that s/he has presented a cogent argument. Perhaps Xiaxue is after all, like me, not an IT expert who doesn't build her own website. 

Surely a more sensible defence of her counter would be to have done exactly what I have done in this blog post: merely explain the technology behind the way such counters work. So regardless of the source of your counter, they all run on the same technology - hence that would be more than sufficient to prove that Xiaxue (or Nuffnang) did not tamper with the counter to produce fake results. This all boils down to the technology that runs those counters - not the source of the counter per se, hence Xiaxue and her supporter(s) behind the SMRT is missing an A for a reason are totally missing the point when they insist that the source of her counter is Google/Blogger. Why and how did they make such a major mistake then, given that Xiaxue usually pays such attention to details? I don't want to speculate, but given the way I had to consult an IT expert to figure all this out, it is possible that you can offer any plausible sounding explanation to the general public and they would probably say, "OK if you say so, I don't really understand the complex IT stuff... I am not an IT expert so I cannot verify if all these arguments are valid or not." 

Most of us don't really understand the complex IT stuff...

But if you want to go down the IT route, then you had better get the science right. So in this case, I can conclude that Xiaxue is not guilty of tampering with the counter on her blog - but the explanation offered on ThemissingA is a rather poorly put together one that does not stand up to scrutiny when placed under the spotlight with an IT expert. Such is the irony: I can only hope hat the person behind ThemissingA is not Xiaxue herself (well, my gut instinct is that it probably isn't) as it would reflect very poorly on her if it was. So there you go, that's just one little piece of the puzzle of the ongoing saga - I had a look at Xiaxue's latest post on her blog and oh dear, I even felt bad asking my IT expert to try to analyze any more of the claims she made as I'm sure he has much better things to do with his time. I'm sure she has a point to make (and yes she has the right to clarify things when under attack as such), but I wonder how many people actually got to the end of her post as it was so incredibly long? Good grief. Aiyoh. TL;DR.

I've got better things to do with my New Year's Day. I hope you do too - I hope I've cast some light on the issue of how these blog counters work. Do let me know what you think about this: many thanks for reading, happy new year!