Make your website a black hole to big tech • Hacker News Board

Re: Make your website a black hole to big tech

#81

Post by gorkemcetin » Fri, Dec 06, 2019, 1:27 PM UTC

ibudiallo wrote: post #38

Most people I know with small websites will not pay $15/month for analytics. The privacy part of it is also not really the concern of small website owners. This is not to dismiss Fathom entirely. But there are free alternative (with server setup cost) that keeps your data private: Matomo (formerly Piwik). I've run it in parallel with Google Analytics and it was the closest replacement I could find. But again, small w…

Have you tried Countly alongside other GA alternatives by the way? Would like to hear your opinions on that as well.

Re: Make your website a black hole to big tech

#82

Post by lance76 » Sat, Dec 07, 2019, 1:19 AM UTC

I still don’t understand why small website owners don’t just use their server logs.

They can not be defeated by privacy focused browsers or by JavaScript being inactive.

The only real problem with them is that they (typically) requires access to CPanel (although you can make the stats ‘public’) and that the interfaces are ancient and typically not mobile-friendly. Thinking of AWStats in particular but the rest seem similar.

Some cheaper hosts also kill your old stats (and logs) after a year or so, so you lose cool 5-year growth stats.

I mean, we LITERALLY, already have the data we need. Sitting right there. On our own servers. But we don’t look at it or have good (easy) tools, so we sling third-party JavaScript onto all our webpages and consult someone else.

Something has gone backwards (again) on the internet.

Re: Make your website a black hole to big tech

#83

Post by jobigoud » Sun, Dec 08, 2019, 9:59 AM UTC

jchw wrote: post #15

colechristensen wrote: post #11

Is there any analytics kind of product that just pulls information from web server access logs? There are lots of cases I can think of where I wouldn't be all that interested in gathering Google Analytics level data and would be fine with being able to do a bit of analysis about unique users and usage patterns. (beyond doing it myself with a log aggregator and creating my own dashboards)

Funny enough, Urchin was exactly this.

It still is. My personnal websites are on shared hosting at OVH. I get all the analytics I need from Urchin, free of charge, no client side js.

Re: Make your website a black hole to big tech

#84

Post by xp84 » Thu, Dec 12, 2019, 7:57 PM UTC

Fathom "Doesn't use cookies" - so how does it have any concept of things like sessions and unique users then? I really want to know. The website doesn't explain this, it just drops that line and walks away. This is like saying a car "doesn't need tires" - sounds interesting, but wtf does that mean?

I'm assuming it isn't using local or session storage either, because it's pretty disingenuous to replace cookies with a newer technology with about the same purpose and then pretend it's somehow more 'privacy respecting.'

I imagine if its JS rewrote every link on the page to persist some random id as a URL param, it could theoretically accomplish those basic analytics tasks - though it would get tricky when navigation happened by forms or via JS.

Another theory is that maybe they just use IP as a proxy for a user. Pretty flawed since office buildings or home networks with multiple users will just appear as one "person" with a nonsensical usage pattern.

(of course, my above "idea" is functionally identical to a cookie, but the idiot politicians don't understand any of this technology, so it would probably be considered "ok" by the law even though "cookies" are somehow evil and scary).