Sources: The hit counter II · Discovery
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Source. Every metric, default and option meaning on this plate is verbatim from the Web-Counter's own documentation at digits.com, captured from the Wayback Machine between 2 November 1996 and 19 June 1997: usage.html for the rendering contract, colors.html for the defaults, charsets.html for the twenty-eight sets and their credit lines, and info.html for who built it and what it ran on. The rule that the height is always 20 pixels and the width is 15 times the number of digits is quoted directly, and it was checked against five archived counter images rather than trusted: all five are GIF89a and all five are 75 by 20, which is exactly five digits at 15 pixels each. Three of those five are the archived live output of real people's counters with their option strings still legible in the URL. All files are in reference/2-discovery/hit-counter/.
The counter on this page is real, and it is this guide's own. It is the same /api/counter the front page uses, backed by Netlify Blobs, and its entire source is about twenty lines in netlify/functions/counter.mjs: no third party, no cookie, no per-visitor identifier, nothing stored except a single integer. It increments once when you load the page. If the endpoint cannot be reached, which happens on a local dev server with no functions running, the page falls back to a tally in your own browser and says so on screen, because an unlabeled local number presented as a global count is precisely the dishonesty this plate is about.
The digits are drawn here, not rehosted. digits.com's images are marked WebCounter™ Copyright 1996 Net Digits. All Rights Reserved.
, so they are reference for checking metrics and nothing else. The four sets on this page are drawn to the documented 15 by 20 cell: a 7 by 9 glyph at double size is 14 by 18 and centers in the cell without touching the seam. The digital set is built from seven segments rather than copied, the outline set is derived by keeping only glyph pixels with an empty orthogonal neighbor, and the fourth leans alternate rows by a pixel on purpose. Twenty-eight sets existed; four are enough to make the point, and the real ones were donated pixel fonts of roughly this quality, one of them credited as Stolen from the back of the Buffalo Tom CD.
Deliberately absent. Any visitor number presented as historical, any claim about how many sites ran a counter or when they stopped, and any capability the Web-Counter did not have. The claim that its only private feature was -h is a statement about what appears in these captured pages, which is where the full option list comes from. The two modern descendants are described from their own live pages, captured 1 and 2 August 2026: freecounterstat states no license, and GoatCounter's page says it is open source without naming which, so neither is characterized further than its own words.