John Handelaar wrote:
IP-based *anything* - Just Say No. It's *spectactularly* inaccurate and, frankly, an amateur's mistake.
Firstly, sorry about all my messages to the list regarding this idea, I'll keep them to a minimum from hereon. I disagree with the above assumption (though I acknowledge that it is correct -- in *some* ways, and in *some* situations) on the basis of personal experience. This may seem like a strange example, but I once ended up finding out that a cute girl who I'd assumed was out of my league was interested in me thanks to the amateur's mistake of tracking visitors by IP in drupal 4.5. Let me explain (I think this is a good example of how we should be thinking about our users needs when it comes to traffic analysis): I mentioned to her that I had posted a certain essay called "The Renaissance of the Commons" on my blog, and told her to goole my name and the title to find it. The search popped up on my referrers log, and I marked down the IP associated with that search (I did have a crush on her). Later, I checked her IP's history, and found out that she was apparently a lot more interested in what I was writing, than I would have thought. For the next week, I noticed her return twiceto four times a day -- and it suddenly occurred to me that maybe I should ask her out on a date. The end result was me being one satisfied drupal user. Note that I was able to do this solely on the basis of IP tracking hits by IP. Beyond that, I also was able to track a few "high value" visitors like my now future boss. True, this wouldn't have worked had they been AOL users, or part of a UK academic network. However, as far as I know, IP's plus user-agent info is as good as we're going to get from users who don't register at a site. This isn't a bulletproof analysis tool that I'd try to sell to high-profile executives at Time Warner's international marketing team, or any clients who were impressed by phrases like "enterprise-level solution". Rather, its just a practical analysis of data that is already collected, and aimed at a user base of amateurs, or small publications. Your earlier suggestion, I think, is more appropriate for RSS than what I initially proposed. That said, there is great value in giving users at least *something* to track individual users who are not logged in. At the moment, we mostly have to fly blind when it comes to tracking visitors. Just because it doesn't always offer scientifically valid data doesn't mean our users couldn't make use of it. Most users probably do have unique IP's. Instead, I might develop a tool to help people tag certain ip addresses with names. For example, when Bob leaves a comment, there is a record in the access log containing his IP. I could provide a link titled, "track commenter's IP address". Or, when someone searches for "Nick Lewis Drupal", I might find it useful to track the IP that was referred by that search. They might be a potential customer. Clicking the "track IP" link would provide a form where I attach a meaingful name to that IP address. From that I could probably get a sense of Bob's reading habits. That kind of data for multiple users would be userful for me as a way to gauge my success as a writer, and a sense of whether my stock was rising or falling in the eyes of my core readers. Moreover, as a standalone module, we could use other data to weedout wrongly flagged IP addresses (typical stuff like, an array of screen resolutions, operating systems, browsers, ect...) Really, what I want -- and I know many others want this as well -- is something to help me *see* individual readers. I think it is really what the future of the web is all about: remaking the actual into the virtual. Best, Nick Lewis