The unusually high traffic yesterday caused our visitor counts to be reset again, due to a bug in my code. Although the display (at upper left) says “Total:  25,238” and “Unique: 22,884” the actual counts are in the neighborhood of 80,000 to 100,000.

I’ve made changes to the code so that “race conditions” (the technical term for what happens when thousands of people are all trying to view the same page at the same exact microsecond) should no longer reset the counts.

The same sort of bug temporarily affected our registration database on Friday, and I’ve also added the fix to that code. If the count feature seems to be operating smoothly after a shakeout period, I’ll open registration again to new users.