Dear readers,

when we started creating web projects around 1999/2000 there weren’t much tools to track and analyse visitors on websites like today with Google Analytics or Piwik/Matomo. One the of the most nicest and configurable we found quite early in the OpenSource tool chcounter aka expcounter.

It was coded by Christoph Bachner as chcounter, let got and developed further by Volker S. Latainski and the community as expcounter, and development finally stalled years ago, unfortunately.

The usual start dashboard looked like this:

One “killer feature”, for example, was to show a real time, fully configurable counter as seen via the “Wayback Machine” on our video game weblog project zockerseele.com.

We tried hard, over a period of several weeks, to port expcounter from PHP 5.x to PHP 7.x but failed in the end. For every bug we fixed, two to three (or more) new PHP bugs appeared.

According to several forums entries porting seems quite hard, as it requires changes on myriads of files and also several rewrites of code; which we hereby confirm.

It even is mentioned a complete rewrite of the tool which we just couldn’t do in the end and had to let go of the tool. At least, we tried.

What we would like to do with this post is thank Christoph Bachner & Bert Körn firstly for developing this tool which we in the end used for lots, lots of years on several weblogs. We would further like to thank the community of coders which helped Volker S. Latainski make expcounter to what it was: an OpenSource tool how it should be done.

We think there should be no time wasted anymore to port or rewrite this tool and we call the project dead. R.I.P. chcounter/expcounter! Thank you, little counter friend!

Thanks for reading,
the aethyx staff