Re: [Distutils] Inflated download counts

On Fri, Oct 25, 2013 at 13:49 -0400, Donald Stufft wrote:

Mostly new packages will get roughly 2-3k of downloads from what appears to be mirroring infrastructure. I’m hesitant to mess with the traffic numbers at all because I don’t want them to be inaccurate *and* artificial vs just inaccurate (assuming you think it’s the number of people downloading your project).

Is it not possible that the analysis code or Fastly's delivery of logs has bugs? The "inflation" problem only happens sometimes after all. If it were mirroring infrastructure it should be more consistent. holger

On Oct 25, 2013, at 1:22 PM, Dustin Oprea wrote:

...

It seems like the download counts on PyPI aren't accurate. Though the really useful packages seem to have higher numbers than the packages that only apply to a specific target audience, I'm fairly certain that the numbers are more affected by robots and such than actual users.

Recently I started a service that requires membership. In the last month, PyPI reports 3000 downloads of the client, yet Google Analytics only reports a handful of visits to the website. I have even less membership signups (as expected, so soon after launch). Why are the download counts so inflated?

What has to be done to get this to be accurate?

I've included two screenshots of PyPI and GA.

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