User:Interiot/EditcounterOnOtherWikis

Others frequently ask me about setting up an edit counter for other wikis, so I've written this standard response. If you still have questions, please ask me, and I'll try to update this to include all relevant information.

First of all, I'm unable to configure any of the tools on the Toolserver to do the counts for your server... the Toolserver admins will only allow me to use it for Wikimedia-related projects. If your wiki is interesting enough to me, it's possible I might be able to set up one of my edit counters on one of my other personal webservers, but most likely you'll have to do some setup of your own to get it working.

There are many edit counters available, and some will be easier to install or use. Edit counters which run on the end-user's computer are probably relatively easy to install, and have a chance of doing an edit-count on any server. However, the tool will only be available to users who are willing to do the work to install it on their own computer.

Configuring an edit counter for your wiki

There are several server-based edit counters. Several others have written server-based counters, but I've written three:

Tool1 is a CGI Perl HTML-scraper, and would require some setup on a webserver. (source code: [1])

• Pros:
  • It's been proven to work on non-English wikis
  • It has some graphs
  • Only requires a bit of configuration at the top, no code changes. Because it's a scraper, it doesn't need access to the database, and can be set up on any webserver.
• Cons:
  • Isn't particularly easy to configure (though you can bug me perhaps to try to improve this)
  • Like any web-based scraper, it takes longer and longer to count users with very high edit-counts, and users with a very large number of edits (perhaps over 15,000 edits) may cause HTTP timeouts, preventing their edit count from being viewed.

Tool2 is an on-wiki Javascript HTML-scraper, and doesn't require any special access to a webserver. (source code: [2])

• Pros:
  • Can actually be set up by any user of a wiki... doesn't require any special access whatsoever. Setup consists of any user posting some javascript to any page on the desired wiki.
• Cons:
  • It's the least mature of my edit counters. It may well require debugging or code changes to get it working on your wiki.
  • In particular, it doesn't work for Internet Explorer users currently, due to an unanalyzed bug.
  • For users that have many edit counts (eg. >5000), it will cause end-user's browsers to repeatedly pop up a message that says "A javascript program is taking a while to run, do you wish to terminate or continue?", making it difficult to do the count for users with very many edits.

Tool3 is a CGI Perl database-based counter, and would require some setup on a webserver. (source code: [3] [4] [5] [6])

• Pros:
  • The fastest, most efficient option.
  • Generally the most mature and feature-ful of my edit counters... it's regularly used by thousands of non-English users.
• Cons:
  • The script requires read-only access to the same database that your wiki accesses.

If you still have questions, please ask me, and I'll try to update this to include all relevant information.