You people and your ASL. I know what you're asking, since I've been an online chat loser since before you were born. Since this question wasn't even necessary because the only person you'd ever chat with in real time was the Sysop, who broke into your session because you kept uploading the same misconstructed blue-box schematic.

Oh right, the question!
A: I was born in 1976
S: I'm a guy
L: I live in Seattle, WA, USA.

Anyway, isn't it weird that this is a FAQ? Seriously, I get email all the time that just says, "ASL?" as if we were sitting there in the #hotbaloney chat room and I had just shown up for the first time.

You can re-do the steps above anytime, and as long as you put the exact same name in, you get the same counter, with the count the same.

Nope, I don't record that information. That sounds like it could make trouble and also take up humongous tracts of disk space.

Nope. I have no way to tell who is the "real" owner of a counter. Indeed, this has no meaning to me. So, there's no way to tell who I should listen to in order to reset the counter. So I don't! Kind of makes authentication a non-issue, which I like.

Look. I made this thing to remove all but the slightest nuance of effort from expressing affection. If that's too much for you, I can't help you any more. (Note: I have done this once, for the very first person who asked me this. But that's the only one I'll ever do.)

Well, first I got a funny idea, then I made a perl script. Then ten million people thought it was a good idea and the perl script was overwhelmed and could not keep up. Then I rewrote it in C, with a better system for handling shared data and made it a fastcgi server. Now it is pretty fast, considering how many people use it and that it runs on a 300 MHz Pentium II. (That's 0.3 GHz, kids.)

Oh, well after the internet bubble burst, I found myself without a job for ten months. That is a long time to have no income, but still have to pay rent, buy food, make car and insurance payments, and pay the electric/gas/water bills. Because of that, I was seriously low on things that seemed optional, like food. So I set up a button with paypal, since it seemed like a lot of people liked the hug button and I figured if they liked it so much they might want to buy me a donut. A lot of people did, and I didn't go hungry. Those folks are responsible for this thing still existing, since it is a non-trivial use of resources over here, at this point.

However, I'm not poor these days, so I don't need donations. You can still donate, but it's not critical. I'll eventually replace the cheesy old computer it runs on with something faster, donations or no.

My sense is that this feature would increase server load a lot, so I'm waiting until I can upgrade before adding this kind of thing. I am thinking about it, though. I'm also thinking about making it so you can interact with this thing from other places.