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GoatCounter – Simple web statistics, with no tracking of personal data

goatcounter.com

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Re: GoatCounter – Simple web statistics, with no tracking of personal data

#51

Post by nathancahill »

Carpetsmoker wrote: post #17
masonwear wrote: post #11

This reminds me of https://usefathom.com/ ! Both solving an important problem in my eyes.

It was actually written as an alternative to Fathom! My original plan was to contribute to Fathom until it suited my needs, but the Open Source version of Fathom is on indefinite hiatus and the maintainers are working on a (closed) rewrite. I decided that starting from scratch would be better, as there were some things I would have preferred to do fundamentally different. What I really wanted was to add analytics to…

Oh no! What's the source on the indefinite hiatus? I use Fathom for all of my sites. Haven't heard about any of this. Can you point me to anything?

Re: GoatCounter – Simple web statistics, with no tracking of personal data

#52

Post by WinonaRyder »

intrepidhero wrote: post #50

Can someone explain the attraction of embedded JS for analytics, what exactly does it buy you versus log parsing? Log parsing seems like the logical choice for the static site crowd but it seems like there's little interest there. I must be missing something.

The most obvious one I miss (I don't currently only use server-side analytics) is something like screen size. You can do user-agent sniffing to _guess_ what the size of a mobile device is, but it doesn't tell you whether or not you can stop wasting time making your content responsive on a tiny screen that no-one uses anymore.

Re: GoatCounter – Simple web statistics, with no tracking of personal data

#53

Post by monkin »

arp242 wrote: post #25
kuzimoto wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about Matomo[0]? [0] https://matomo.org/

I used it for a while, and found the UX really hard. YMMV, but I wasn't happy with it. Also, the hosted version isn't free, and self-hosting is also comparative expensive (vs. free) and time-consuming. IMHO any serious GA alternative should have a free hosted option. I wrote about that a bit more in-depth yesterday over here: https://lobste.rs/s/ooag4u/goatcounter_1_0_release#c_o76csv

In past many companies wanted to do "free analytics for people", and we don't see them anymore, you can't compete with Google offering having just free option. Google runs on scale and they can keep it free, and sell or use data from it.

If you want to build analytics software on moral grounds for privacy and stuff you will just bleed out or just run very niche or indie business. It's great for nomadic makers, but not for serious business.

Look on Matomo, Simple Analytics or Fathom. They are all great(besides Matomo) but they can't compete on other market than small business. And yes, I know that Matomo has enterprise clients, but they are also small comparing to GA. :)

Want to compete with them? Have a great plan and support from major search engine like DDG. If not, then you can make another Mixpanel(which is great!).

Re: GoatCounter – Simple web statistics, with no tracking of personal data

#54

Post by nurpax »

intrepidhero wrote: post #50

Can someone explain the attraction of embedded JS for analytics, what exactly does it buy you versus log parsing? Log parsing seems like the logical choice for the static site crowd but it seems like there's little interest there. I must be missing something.

At least static sites on places like GitHub pages need client-side analytics as you cannot access their logs.

Re: GoatCounter – Simple web statistics, with no tracking of personal data

#55

Post by Carpetsmoker »

galfarragem wrote: post #47

The only thing that stops me from switching from Google is pricing. I have 2 niche blogs (does that count as commercial?) as a side project that barely makes any money and paying $180/year is completely unrealistic. I would switch without blinking with a more friendly pricing.

I'm not too fussy about it; if you have a small side project with a reasonable amount of traffic that earns you a little bit of pocket money then that's just "personal" as far as I'm concerned. It's really hard to codify these kind of things, so I just made it "commercial/non-commercial" which is simple and clear.

Hit me up on email and we can arrange something: support@goatcounter.com

Re: GoatCounter – Simple web statistics, with no tracking of personal data

#56

Post by michaelbuckbee »

There's no definitive answer to this as it would take a court ruling (that hasn't happened), but my own I am not a lawyer but deal with GDPR/CCPA professionally understanding does not match the "You don't need to deal with GDPR" pitch of these services.

Say you run a SAAS and install this on your marketing site. You're still sending IP address and potentially identifiable information to a third party processor.

We (on HN) don't consider IP addresses as PII, but from a purely practical standpoint ad data brokers are selling/bidding on IP addresses all the time which makes them more than nothing.

You (as the controller) also need to validate that processors (services that you are using) are in fact doing what they're saying. You'd still need a Data Processing Agreement in place with GoatCounter because otherwise Goat could start collecting additional information without your knowledge, start generating more metadata (GeoIP/Company) from the IP, etc.

I'm just saying it's not only about not collecting data, but the processes that surround it and safeguarding users and their privacy.

Re: GoatCounter – Simple web statistics, with no tracking of personal data

#57

Post by teej »

intrepidhero wrote: post #50

Can someone explain the attraction of embedded JS for analytics, what exactly does it buy you versus log parsing? Log parsing seems like the logical choice for the static site crowd but it seems like there's little interest there. I must be missing something.

There’s 100x more bots that don’t run JS than do, so the presence of a running JS environment is a helpful filter. User agent is not a good substitute.

Re: GoatCounter – Simple web statistics, with no tracking of personal data

#58

Post by tndl »

intrepidhero wrote: post #50

Can someone explain the attraction of embedded JS for analytics, what exactly does it buy you versus log parsing? Log parsing seems like the logical choice for the static site crowd but it seems like there's little interest there. I must be missing something.

I agree with you, however the only popular static site host (other than having your own vps or whatever) to add an analytics solution that I've seen is Netlify. I use it and I'm pretty happy with it so far, but it's very barebones and pretty expensive ($9/month for just the analytics)

Re: GoatCounter – Simple web statistics, with no tracking of personal data

#59

Post by AndrewStephens »

intrepidhero wrote: post #50

Can someone explain the attraction of embedded JS for analytics, what exactly does it buy you versus log parsing? Log parsing seems like the logical choice for the static site crowd but it seems like there's little interest there. I must be missing something.

I can tell you in one word: bots.

Any site is constantly being accessed by bots, only some of whom announce themselves in the user agent. Some are deliberately designed to mimic human browsing and you can only tell by carefully following their access pattern.

Filtering out the bots from the logs in an automatic fashion seemed like too much work so I implemented a javascript beacon. I figure anyone without JS probably doesn't want to be tracked anyway.

Re: GoatCounter – Simple web statistics, with no tracking of personal data

#60

Post by rawrmaan »

intrepidhero wrote: post #50

Can someone explain the attraction of embedded JS for analytics, what exactly does it buy you versus log parsing? Log parsing seems like the logical choice for the static site crowd but it seems like there's little interest there. I must be missing something.

For dynamic sites, new page views often happen without any HTTP requests as the app renders the page and changes the URL entirely client side.
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