A new way of counting readers

As far as I can tell, Piperka's retained its users pretty well. But, as is to be expected, not everyone stays. This matters when counting the amount of readers a comic has. With all the stale user data, older comics tend to be overrepresented. I added a rule there that disregards any users who haven't been active within the last half a year. I'm not removing anyone's account with it, if someone logs in again then they get marked as active users once again.

I've collected a table of how the top 50 changed with this. I'm happy with the results, at least. xkcd still keeps its first place and the changes in rankings seem sensible.

Though I do consider collecting comic rankings as a secondary function to Piperka. If only because Piperka isn't a generic comic listing, but only lists comics that it can index. Even if that fits most web comics with public archives. I suppose there is potential to get some pretty accurate rankings from Piperka's data, since it reflects what people actually read, not just whose readers are most active at doing something secondary like clicking a vote incentive. Collecting more accurate user data is yet another area where I could do more, of course.

Next up: search functionality. Ready whenever it is.