[Distutils] Inflated download counts

[Donald Stufft]

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).

On Oct 25, 2013, at 1:22 PM, Dustin Oprea <dustin at randomingenuity.com> 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.
> 
> 
> 
> Dustin Oprea
> <Selection_001.png><Selection_002.png>_______________________________________________
> Distutils-SIG maillist  -  Distutils-SIG at python.org
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-----------------
Donald Stufft
PGP: 0x6E3CBCE93372DCFA // 7C6B 7C5D 5E2B 6356 A926 F04F 6E3C BCE9 3372 DCFA

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