After the launch of the meet the stats site, I started working a lot with much more optimized code. I've completely re-written the backpack viewer code from scratch, using the newly found MongoDB on my new server.

Please join the new group, linked on the new site. I got a shorter URL for both sites in the network.

http://stats.tf
http://backpack.tf

This group will be made private starting now. Please join the new group!

Today is the official launch of "Meet the Stats" -- this is a much more advanced version of the item stats that were available on the site. We're very excited to hear what you have to say about it. Please join us at http://stats.teamfortress.org and join the new steam group dedicated to this new community tool.

More surprises coming soon!

Quick update for you guys.

New feature: Item stats. It's not perfect yet, but I thought enough backpacks have been scanned to make it public.. So that the numbers actually mean something. I started this project a few days ago, after I noticed other stats web sites were hiding some of the information. Since we already scan the backpacks, why not make stats from them?

There are a lot of stats that we could do, but some of them were really odd. For example, the "origin" of items seems to be really inaccurate. Lots of items that are acquired by promotion were showing as 'timed drop' and various other weird stuff, so while we do track this in our database it is not visible because we do not believe it is correct and/or valid information.

That said, while we do scan backpacks every few seconds (people scanning their backpacks) -- You might notice the stats page only gets updated every couple hours. The reason for this is simple: it is pretty intensive on the database. Starting this optimization got me started into optimizing other parts of the site. We were loading the items directly from the database each page load, which in theory is not terrible because it is quite fast, the traffic started getting higher and page loads took longer... Now we're caching a bunch of stuff, and it is completely transparent to the user.

I thought I would share some of the stats about our visitors. Some of you might find it interesting, most probably won't care, but it helps putting a perspective on how much this tool is used.

In the past 30 days, we've had:
13,507 Visits
5,741 Unique Visitors
41,570 Pageviews
40.80% New Visits

Of those 13,507 visits, our top referrer reddit.com sent 1,609 visits our way. Thanks :D

Browser usage:
1. Chrome 6,784 50.23%
2. Firefox 4,458 33.01%
3. Internet Explorer 772 5.72%


We have visitors from pretty much everywhere in the world, but here are the top 5:
1. United States 6,767
2. Canada 1,100
3. United Kingdom 814
4. Russia 806
5. Australia 750

As for Ad revenue... You might think ads are useless and annoying, but they do help pay the costs for hosting. Unfortunately it doesn't pay enough for me to stop working, though... but anyone can dream, right? :D

In the past 30 days, we've made 14.75$ in ad revenue.
That's 34 clicks total.
27700 page views. This means a bit less than half the page views didn't see any ads, and didn't generate any revenue.

But overall, who can complain? This is already covering the costs of hosting. Thanks for supporting the site, it is definitely appreciated!

The site should give a more accurate value of each hat. I have tested a bunch and they were much closer in value than what was done before.

The first version of the site gave a simple hat value based on the hat's regular value, effect and a few hats had bonuses for being multiclass.

Now the new algorithm removes that "multiclass" bonus and replaces it into accounting which classes the hat is for. Depending on the class, the hat will be valued higher.

Obviously it won't be perfect, but I think this is pretty close to as automated as possible. Anything else would require an insane amount of manual work and this wouldn't be something I am interested in doing. :D

I have also added paint splatters on items, and wrapped gifts will show contents in the hover box now.