4 ms·

Thank you for that sweet reply! Yes you are right, there is so many combinations and as you found out a lot of people are using adblockers! I did not know abo

Thank you for that sweet reply! Yes you are right, there is so many combinations and as you found out a lot of people are using adblockers! I did not know about goaccess, that looks really cool! I will check that out! The problem with analyzing logs is that it is difficult to track unique visits purely from logs. Also differentiating bots that tries to look like real humans. Kibana and logstash is awesome, but it is not the easiest to setup if you compare it to Google Analytics.

herbst 11y ago
Yeah i figured at least 20% of my 80% are bots. If not more. And you are right, without Javascript its not really possible to have detailed informations like with Analytics. Following the user around should be possible with the usual access logs, but i have yet to find a software that supports this, and i can imagine its hard to create as there are so many different combinations of everything. Its really interesting to think about. I can see no solution for this, just how it will get worse and worse over time. People are more and more scared about Trackers and block them sometimes in way to consequent ways, hence i even had users complaining about a broken design when they had some browser extension which removed every element containing social media names in the tags. Something like <section id="why-i-hate-facebook"> is appearantly not acceptable for some.
- kevinsimper 11y ago
  I only really see three solutions: One is creating a service that uses a sdk that works into whatever webserver you are using and then slightly alters your html to input different detection methods. That would make it impossible to block or possible to detect a block. (index.html was loaded, but .js was not) Allowing a tracker to be served from a subdomain. This way it is not thirdparty and should be okay. Analytics over websockets. --- But it will not be easy and will probably be a weapons race with adblockers. The problem is really only with thirdparty trackers, that when have data across multiple sites can make a much deeper profile about you than a single site can make without you allowing it. So if we can convince everybody about that, that would be great!
  - herbst 11y ago
    I was going to write about how one could fix this with CNAME'ing the tracker/ad services and beeing able to choose custom file names. AFAIK most blockers just block requests based on patterns and not actually look at the DOM (sure some do, but those are paranoid fuckers anyway). You are right that the profile it creates can be scary, and honestly i block everything i can. I just happen to think about the business side as well. Remember when we tracked with images? I dont even remember why, but in the early days all we did was a 1x1 image. Piwik even still supports tracking images, i dont know how good the data can get that way tho.

herbst 11y ago

Yeah i figured at least 20% of my 80% are bots. If not more. And you are right, without Javascript its not really possible to have detailed informations like with Analytics. Following the user around should be possible with the usual access logs, but i have yet to find a software that supports this, and i can imagine its hard to create as there are so many different combinations of everything. Its really interesting to think about. I can see no solution for this, just how it will get worse and worse over time. People are more and more scared about Trackers and block them sometimes in way to consequent ways, hence i even had users complaining about a broken design when they had some browser extension which removed every element containing social media names in the tags. Something like <section id="why-i-hate-facebook"> is appearantly not acceptable for some.

kevinsimper 11y ago
I only really see three solutions: One is creating a service that uses a sdk that works into whatever webserver you are using and then slightly alters your html to input different detection methods. That would make it impossible to block or possible to detect a block. (index.html was loaded, but .js was not) Allowing a tracker to be served from a subdomain. This way it is not thirdparty and should be okay. Analytics over websockets. --- But it will not be easy and will probably be a weapons race with adblockers. The problem is really only with thirdparty trackers, that when have data across multiple sites can make a much deeper profile about you than a single site can make without you allowing it. So if we can convince everybody about that, that would be great!
- herbst 11y ago
  I was going to write about how one could fix this with CNAME'ing the tracker/ad services and beeing able to choose custom file names. AFAIK most blockers just block requests based on patterns and not actually look at the DOM (sure some do, but those are paranoid fuckers anyway). You are right that the profile it creates can be scary, and honestly i block everything i can. I just happen to think about the business side as well. Remember when we tracked with images? I dont even remember why, but in the early days all we did was a 1x1 image. Piwik even still supports tracking images, i dont know how good the data can get that way tho.