"Monthly Stats Report" email incomplete

[tosommerfugle]

I've just received my Monthly Stats Report email, which is excellent as my timezone is CET. However, I noticed that only the first 30 days of october were covered. No numbers for the 31th.

Just wanted to let you know, even if this is no big issue.

[webado]

Well, since yesterday when you received the email it was barely Oct 31, including it would have meant including a partial day only.

[bobby131313]

Well if you subscribe to a monthly report... shouldn't SC wait until the month is complete to send you said monthly report? That's the whole point of a monthly report isn't it?

[webado]

You'd think?

I don't know, I only get a couple of weekly reports, never tried monthly.

[bobby131313]

Me neither. Daily and weekly work fine.

[davep4hpg]

Hi,

I have to agree with the OP on this, I got my monthly report and it excluded the 31st October, not much point in having a monthly report which doesn't include the full month.

[tosommerfugle]

Webado, I'd suggest that you at least read and comprehend all of a quite short post before assuming that an attempt of just explaining away has any relevance.

I specifically mentioned the timezone issue to indicate that it would actually have been a complete october 31th, and thus a complete month. The way the stats are presented make it clear that the timezone specified in the user profile is being used for this purpose.

The statcounter Monthly Stats Report function correctly observed end-of-month, but was unable to produce the corresponding report. Clearly a bug, albeit not of major impact.

[webado]

Your post was at 10-31-2009, 09:07 PM (in my timezone), viewed now after the time rollback.

It would have been 07:07pm in yours I believe, again after the rollback.

Not important other than to show the last day of the month was not finished yet and thus the day the report gets run should not be included in a report, be it weekly or monthly.

Reports do appear to cut off at the day before when the report is run, which is as it should be.

What may be in debate is the day the monthly report gets run - when should that happen. To my logic that should happen on or after the first of the following month. In your case this appears to have been run prematurely. I suspect according to the SC server (which has an internal clock going by GMT) the run date was Nov 1. However at the moment stats were being compiled the script doing that made use of your timezone and decided the 31st was not yet finished so it didn't include its stats.



After your post I requested a monthly report for one of my projects, and asked for it to also be sent right away. It went up to and including Oct 31, the run date being Nov 1.

I will see next month when it runs on whatever schedule SC uses, how it runs.

If you think my response is/was irrelevant, so be it. It's less a response to you than to others who may read the forum.

[tosommerfugle]

Well, my posting was 02:07 am (CET) on november 1. The headers for the mail has:
Date: Sun, 1 Nov 2009 01:39:01 +0100

The important thing is that the month was finished. The online summary stats also had switched from october 31 to november 1, just as it should. I specifically checked that. Seen from my end, nothing to suggest that the report was cut off prematurely. Of course, any timing issues on the Statcounter end are invisible to me.

Checking previous monthly reports indicate that it works most of the time, However, the same issue has (for me) affected the stats for october 2008, march 2009 and now october 2009.

Of course, I do realize that a main audience of forum responses are other readers. This also means that the wrong before-midnight speculation needed to be corrected (now twice). If I had not included the timezone consideration in my original post, your guesswork would have been relevant, but still off target.

[webado]

Oh, my error - I thought CET was in a time zone in North America, 2 hours behind mine. I see you are in Europe actually so way ahead.

The hour is supposed to have rolled back at 2am on Nov 1st, in all places which observe that, so after the rollback it would be 1am Nov 1st again.

Your timestamp may have been from your email client, which would roll back alnong with yoru OS (if set to roll back).

Whether that was 1:39am pre-rollback or post-rollback, can you tell?

I don't think web servers generally roll back or forward the time. So the monthly report script stars running at or after midnight GMT on Nov 1st - so that's pre-rollback for you, and also before the 31st is actually finished in your time zone (regardless of rollback time if your timezone observes that). It takes some time to complete the runs and compile reports and send out emails anyway, but the cutoff would have been midnight GMT at the server level. This last point is likely the cause of the discrepancy. How easy or difficult it would be to address is anybody's guess.

I suppose you can re-request that monthly report and it will likely be correct now.


Rather academic anyway at this point.

It does look like months with 31 days are often problematic.


Do you know that in general, as a matter of IT trivia, of all date based operations month-end ones are hardest to program properly?