Help:DPL/Hit counters removed
| Manual | Hit counters removed |
MediaWiki 1.25 Changes Affecting DPL
MediaWiki no longer includes hit counters in core, following a request for comment (see here), which means that Special:PopularPages and the "Most Viewed Pages" section of Special:Statistics are now removed. The hit numbers, which occurred until the 1.25 upgrade was installed, will still be kept in the database, but they will no longer be updated. If you want to continue using this functionality, it has been re-implemented (see here) into Extension:HitCounters.
Deletion list
- $wgDisableCounters
- $wgHitcounterUpdateFreq
- page_counter field of the page table
- hitcounter table
- Special:PopularPages
So what does this mean for DPL?
- addpagecounter=true is no longer valid
- format can no longer use %COUNT%, %COUNTFS%, or %COUNTFS2%
- ordermethod=counter is no longer valid
Is there a future for hit counters?
There is an Extension:HitCounters which can provide the page views functionality that was removed in MediaWiki 1.25. This extension is currently not actively maintained.
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.
Unfortunately, some incompatibilities have been reported. Please see Extension:HitCounters for the full article.