About item statistics on backpack.tf
Stats are gathered by parsing inventories as they are loaded
on-site. We log every new item we see to Elasticsearch, and this
information is used to populate data for item
histories, the Premium search system, and of course detailed
statistics for each item.
There are, however, some caveats to doing this:
-
We are unable to process private inventories. Items in a private inventory are considered to not
exist until the inventory is made public or traded to a public inventory.
-
As of October 2014,
inventory privacy has been set to Friends Only by default. Because of this, inventories of many
casual users cannot be counted.
-
We will always lag behind by a few minutes. Displaying up-to-date statistics on items is an
expensive process, so extensive use of caching is done to make sure we don't hit the item index
too hard.
-
Some statistics such as owner count are a little fuzzy for performance reasons.
In other words, don't expect perfect statistics, as this is unfortunately impossible to
guarantee.