Active Counter
2
active right now
A real-time counter showing how many people are currently browsing the site. The green blinking pixel in the navigation bar shows the current count — that's what brought you here.
The counter tracks unique visitors over a 10-minute sliding window. If you stay active on the site, your presence keeps refreshing. After 10 minutes of inactivity, you drop off the count.
How to Play
You're already playing. Every page you visit keeps you counted as active.
How It's Built
- Privacy-first: IP addresses are hashed with SHA-256 using a random salt that rotates every time the server restarts. Raw IPs are never stored.
- In-memory: The tracker uses a simple HashMap protected by a RwLock. No database, no persistence — if the server restarts, the count resets to zero.
- Background cleanup: A background task runs every 60 seconds to remove entries older than the 10-minute TTL window.
- DoS protection: The tracker caps at 50,000 entries. New IPs are silently dropped if capacity is reached, while existing visitors continue to be tracked.