The True.Origin Archive Tops the Hit Parade

John Stear
Revised August 2006

The True.Origin Archive is a young Earth creationist (YEC) web site run by one Timothy Wallace.  Wallace's main claim to fame is that his site is an unsuccessful imitation of The Talk.Origins Archive, a most successful and comprehensive site which showcases the absurdity of YEC bible based science.  In reality Wallace's site is just another YEC site filled with the usual untruths and inaccuracies seen in scores of YEC sites encountered on the 'net.

I visited Wallace's site recently and was intrigued to learn that according to the hit counter on the home page almost two million visits had been recorded since November 1997.  I believed this to be somewhat high so I checked a little more closely and noticed that Wallace has placed a hit counter on every page.

When I logged on the "Home" page was registering 1,781,933 visits.  I accessed three internal links, returning to the home page each time by clicking the "Back" button. Each time I returned to the home page the tally remained at 1,781,933.  I then accessed a fourth link, returning to the home page via the "Home" link before accessing another link. Bearing in mind that each page has its own hit counter, the first link I accessed registered 1,781,935 (two hits), the second 1,781,939 (four hits), the third 1,781,943 (four hits) and the fourth 1,781,945 (two hits) .  I then returned, via the "Home" link, to the home page which then registered 1,781,946.

Put simply, I logged on to Wallace's site, visited four internal links and the site registered 13 visits.

It has always been my understanding that the purpose of installing a hit counter is to record the number of visits the site receives.  I don't believe a visit should be recorded each time the visitor accesses a page within that site.  To me that is unethical and I certainly would not record visits in that way on NAiG.

If Timothy Wallace can explain why his apparently ambiguous method of recording visits isn't designed to enhance The True.Origin Archive's reputation I'll gladly post his explanation on NAiG.

UPDATE:     I've recently returned to True.Origins and lo! all hit counters appear to have been deleted.  However, on the Internet Archive, can be found a record of True.Origins pages from May 1999 through to 17 March 2005 indicating that up to at least 17 March 2005 the site contained hit counters on each page.