The way this counter works is it creates a cookie on the user's computer with their IP and it updates the count according to the status of that cookie. If the cookie is present and the IP in the cookie is the same as the user's current IP then the script knows the user has already been there and it does nothing or if it is present, but has an IP different than the user's current IP or is not present the script knows that the user is either new or was there before, but the cookie has expired so it then updates the count. This script will be using the setcookie() function, which must be sent before any headers are sent. Basically what that means is that it must be placed before any HTML. The count will be held in a text file for ease of use but if you desire to use a database that is perfectly acceptable.

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