One significant potential source of error in Leon's (marvelous!)
new hitcount stats is the possibility that one reader is for
whatever reason fetching the same page multiple times (perhaps
due to nothing more than a prolonged edit).
Obviously it would be best to filter out multiple fetches of the
same page from the same IP address over some interval, probably
one day. (Yes, this could then undercount hits from behind NAT
firewalls and proxies, but I think it'd still be worth it overall.)
I know that Leon's scheme is currently not logging IP addresses,
and given AOL's recent high-profile screwup I have to agree that
not logging IP addresses in this context is probably a good idea.
But what if we logged a one-way hash of the IP address, that
couldn't be correlated with anything else?