Who reads this, and how many.

How this is counted. Server-side, from this site’s own access log. No cookie, no script in the browser, no tracking pixel, nothing on your device. Your IP address is reduced to a checksum with a daily-rotating salt as it is read and is not stored; only counts are kept. Details in the privacy notice.

What these figures are not. “Visitor-days” is the sum of daily counts, not a number of distinct people: someone reading on three days counts three times. It cannot be otherwise, because the identifier rotates daily — which is the point. Bots are recorded as requests but count neither as visitors nor towards “most read”, or a crawler would decide what looks popular. The detection is a heuristic: it finds automated clients that identify themselves and misses any that do not.