Sorry, I don’t agree in that point – but that’s the reason I implemented the interval as an option so everybody can use the interval she/he likes to use.
If a visitor shows up at 9am for 5 minutes and comes back at 7pm for 10 minutes it *is* a revisit/new unique visit in my opinion.
Unique visit = visitor shows up, does what he wants to do on the blog and leaves.
Fair and informative: results from the point of view of the admin – what do I want to know from the statistics system. Visits like the ones I described or Visits of a unique IP within the given interval.
Example: Let’s place some ads on a blog. The sponsor wants to know about the number of unique visits in order to calculate the estimated number of showed ads.
Say we have 500 different IPs/day, 50 of them come back a second time a day (it’s just an example, not very realistic…).
Using your algorithm (unique visitors) the sponsor calculates a minimum of 500 ad views.
Using ‘unique visits‘ the sponsor calculates a minimum of 550 ad views because 50 users come back a second time and the ads are displayed again.
BUT: The default 5 min interval IS too short and will be changed in the next update.
By the way – IPs can change (dynamic changing IPs from ISP, re-dial-in, anonymization service – that’s a big problem for statistics systems, besides that 2 people *could* be behind the same PC (or many people behind a network) and independantly visit your blog – they’d use the same IP but the’d be two different visitors. Say my wife and myself are registered to the same discussion board (e.g. photography), at some age my son registers himself, too. Now we have three people visiting the same website from the same IP – are we *one* visitor ?
*reminder to myself: look into this forum more often, 1 week answering delay is too long, sorry for that.*
Edit: I don’t like the f-word. Maybe explain your opinion (which is right, too – just another point of view) instead?
