13 · Event log

The log records events: an entry opened, a rating given, a notification sign-up, an arrival from outside. Each carries a time, a country, a browser, a referrer and a language. That is enough to see which text is alive and which merely sits there, and which channel people arrive through.

The network address is anonymised after three months — the last quarter of the address becomes zero, and for a newer notation its second half is cut away. The rest of the event stays, because a statistic from a year ago still means something, while an address from a year ago has no purpose left beyond identifying one particular person.

All of it sits in the site's database. There is no tool here that would build a reader profile for advertising along the way — not out of ideology, but because a literary site has nothing to draw from such a profile, while a reader has something to lose.