Gotcha!

Give people a chance to speak their minds, give them a public forum and this sort of thing is bound to happen. A few weeks ago, FCN gave readers the opportunity to write their own posts on Wednesdays. We relinquished control over our very carefully policed post creation policy and let readers create their own content. We disregarded our own lengthy training and intense qualifications as bloggers and gave the faithful few the floor.

The result? Our own readers caught a slight discrepancy between fact and the reported reader statistic on our sidebar. The sidebar clearly says visitor #11 since 2006, a fact first noticed by Unique #11. Big Mo, Sarah and FCNisFake jumped on the bandwagon revealing what appears to be, at first rush of blood to the face, a bald-faced lie.

Let us start off by saying that we miswrote our stat counter script in December of 2006. We had heard reports of eleven readers but none came to visit during the "corkscrew-style" diagnostic test period which formed the template for future measurement. Now, it is possible in the most recent instance in which we discussed this that we misspoke with regard to, you know, the hit counter. The facts are clear from contemporaneous news accounts that we were entering a potentially dangerous situation, and we have written about this before, we have talked about this before and there you have it.

There were reports of visitors in the hills who never actually made it to the site. That is what we wrote on FCN, that is what we have said many, many times. And on this one occasion we misspoke, but it’s — the record is clear in terms what we have said before on this topic.

We had not slept for several hours straight, our schedules had been really hectic and our memory was clouded by the events in our lives. Our love lives were wrecks, we were sleep deprived and our memories were clouded. We regret having misrepresented the truth, but remain confident in the general facts.

A second analysis, this time looking more closely at the relevant data and ignoring information which would distract from the goal of an accurate count, reveals that the actual number of visitors to this site since December of 2006 is 12. Older evidence showing our unique reader count at eleven may have been fabricated - or even an outright lie - but other, unnamed evidence is incontrovertible. We promise. The total number of readers is 12. That you can take to the bank or stuff it in your mattress.



Or is it more like this: