111–120 of 143 posts
I used to spend a lot of time looking at logs and trying to make pages better and more content based upon the stats. Then google stopped giving keywords and searched-phrases - I've since found stats of little use most of the time. I wish google would make search-keyword-hiding opt-in for users, and perhaps auto-opted-in if using incognito mode. I am sure most of my visitors would be glad to provide the search phrases…
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I don't think what you're doing is the end of the world, but answer this is extremely patronizing. You've basically said you know some users block your stuff, but you think they probably shouldn't really want to block your stuff, so you devise an end run around them. Then, finally, you conclude that if they really want to block your stuff, they should do something that you yourself admit won't block your stuff, but t…
I'm fine with people being patronizing towards whiny, entitled users who think they have a right to use any website they want on their terms. If you don't like someone running log analysis on their traffic then don't go to their website, nobody forced you to.
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I'm fine with people being patronizing towards whiny, entitled users who think they have a right to use any website they want on their terms. If you don't like someone running log analysis on their traffic then don't go to their website, nobody forced you to.
How exactly does one know which websites will do this and which wont, before going to the website?
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If your business is to track people, yes. If it's to gather statistics without tracking people (like page views), I think it perfectly fine to bypass ad blockers. We even have a dedicated feature for bypassing ad blockers [1] because we think page views are not privacy invasive. We drop IP addresses from every request so there is no personal data in our database or logs. If you really want to block you can enable the…
The privacy game is about power, not about who is doing what right now. People shun Google's data collection because of what Google can do with the data, not what it has done or is doing; it only takes a single case of data misuse to reveal the power dynamics even if nothing has happened to them personally. You don't have to play the privacy game -- there is a lot of space between really respecting user's privacy and…
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What do you mean? I think using CloudFront is not accurate enough if you use caching.
They've got an enterprise logging tool that'll give you all the info needed for this sort of tracking. https://support.cloudflare.com/hc/en-us/articles/216672448-C...
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The author said it himself, he could have just put Cloudfront in front of Pages and parsed the access logs there. The referrer and user-agent, which are sent by the browser, are in the request headers. There would be no need for JS or an image if the website owner just changed their setup. How do you deal with this sort of tracking?
What do you mean? I think using CloudFront is not accurate enough if you use caching.
I removed GA completely on https://geocode.xyz/ Cloudflare provides all the basic analytics I need and I can parse the log files in the command line if I need more.
I'm also doing cloudflare only but they don't give you certain important metrics like unique sessions. Can you tell me where and how you are parsing cloudflare logs?
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I'm fine with people being patronizing towards whiny, entitled users who think they have a right to use any website they want on their terms. If you don't like someone running log analysis on their traffic then don't go to their website, nobody forced you to.
How exactly does one know which websites will do this and which wont, before going to the website?
I used to spend a lot of time looking at logs and trying to make pages better and more content based upon the stats. Then google stopped giving keywords and searched-phrases - I've since found stats of little use most of the time. I wish google would make search-keyword-hiding opt-in for users, and perhaps auto-opted-in if using incognito mode. I am sure most of my visitors would be glad to provide the search phrases…
Even if Google wanted, browsers like Safari are going to strip referrer headers of query terms as you navigate between sites.
Give web sites a way to say - thanks for visiting, we noticed you are using a browser that.. or search portal that strips info form us.. would you please click to enable sharing this small bit of info.. more about how we use and what info here..
Something like this could help sites and users. I'd like to toggle it myself. I like how startpage scrambles url queries, but I would turn it off for some sites, whitelist them like some are with ublock etc. I also don't like how p-hub and some others keep queries in the url, and would like an option to scramble, with the site, via browser settings, proxies, whatever it takes.. to give more options, more choice.
Love what you are doing here. A few points: 1. I would rename the pixel.png to something like image.png. Never call your script anything like tracking, analytics, or pixel when you don't want to be blocked by ad blockers. We use hello.js and hello.gif. [1] > Log file parsing is an old-skool but effective way of measuring the traffic to your site. 2. By using a pixel image you can bypass caching. When using server log…
> Never call your script anything like tracking, analytics, or pixel when you don't want to be blocked by ad blockers. But this is a tracking script, no? If I were you I'd keep the name that way so that if people don't want to be tracked, they don't.
No. This is self-hosted analytics, no 3rd-party involved, the way it's supposed to be.
Tracking involves a 3rd-party. Be it Google Analytics or Cambridge Analytica UserTracking (TM).