Hauntboard's whole promise is that every launch's traffic is public. That only means something if you know exactly how the numbers are made. So here's the method, in plain words, including the parts that make our numbers smaller than they could be.
The Three Numbers
We count three things, and we keep them strictly apart:
| Number | What it counts | Where you see it |
|---|---|---|
| Visits | Clicks from Hauntboard through to a maker's website | Every launch page, the board, badges, the stats page |
| Page views | People opening a launch's page on Hauntboard | Every launch page, the maker's dashboard |
| Visitors | Browsers that opened any page on Hauntboard | The stats page |
Visits are the number that matters most to makers, because a visit is someone who went to look at what you built. Votes and page views are nice to have; visits are the traffic.
What Makes Something a Visit
A visit is a click on the "Visit" button on a launch's page. The link goes straight to the maker's site, with no redirect through our servers, which is part of what keeps it a clean, direct link. As the visitor leaves, their browser sends us a small background message saying "a click on this launch". That's all it contains: the launch and the kind of event.
We also add ref=hauntboard and two standard tracking tags to the link, so the visit shows up under our name in the maker's own analytics, even when their browser hides where it came from. If the maker's link already has its own tags, theirs are kept.
Once per Browser, per Launch, per Day
Clicking the same Visit button ten times in a day counts as one visit. So does refreshing a launch page. The rule is applied twice:
- In your browser, a small marker in local storage stops it sending the same event twice in a day.
- On our server, each event is checked against a one-way code made from your IP address and browser, mixed with a random value that changes every day. If that code has already counted for this launch today, the event is dropped.
The second check is the one that matters, because it's the one a script can't get around by clearing local storage.
What We Never Store
We never store your IP address. The one-way code can't be turned back into it, and because the random value changes every day, today's code for you has nothing in common with tomorrow's. The codes themselves are deleted after two days. After that, all that's left is a daily total per launch: "this launch got 14 visits on Tuesday".
We don't use cookies for counting, we don't follow anyone across other websites, and counts aren't tied to accounts. Whether you're signed in makes no difference. The full details are in our privacy policy.
Bots Don't Count
Search engine crawlers, link previewers, uptime monitors and command-line tools all fetch pages, and none of them are people looking at your product. We drop requests from known bots and crawlers before anything is counted. Nothing can filter every bot, so we err on the side of dropping, which keeps the numbers honest rather than flattering.
Why We Say "Visits", Not "People"
For a while, our homepage counted visits as "people who found an app here this week". It sounded better. It also wasn't quite true, so we changed it.
Because the daily code changes every day on purpose, we can't tell that the person who visited on Monday is the same person who came back on Tuesday. So they count twice. The same goes for one person on a phone and a laptop, and for one person visiting three different launches. That's the price of not tracking anyone: we can count visits accurately, but we can't count unique people over time.
So we say what we actually measure. A visit is one browser clicking through to one launch on one day. When we show visitors to Hauntboard itself, the same caveat applies, and the stats page spells it out.
Why the Numbers Are Public
Most launch platforms show votes, which tell you how popular a launch was with the people on the platform, not whether anyone went to see the product. We think makers deserve to know what a launch actually did for them before they spend a week on it, and the only way to make that trustworthy is to show everyone the same numbers.
That includes the small ones. While Hauntboard is new, some weeks will be quiet, and a launch's page might say "6 visits". We'd rather show a real six than a vague "trending". If you're comparing launch platforms, ask each one how they count. If they won't say, that's an answer too.
If you want to see it for yourself, launch on Hauntboard and compare our count with your own analytics. Our guide to tracking launch traffic explains why the two will be close, but never identical.