HN user
yeahh. For me technically it does not make sense for "privacy friendly" web analytics to rely on fingerprinting techniques because the common sentiment seems to be that cookies are bad. At least cookies are easily controllable.
Now shameless adverting: of course I present the solution: https://counter.dev
Hmm interesting. Yes, kind of related still different. It's a sqlite extension to query existing redis server data. Not a redis server itself. But interesting. Thanks for the link!
Hahaha, well it would be a pity to code for months in a basement only to find out there is no use case.
All is up and running again :-)
All is up and running again.
All is up and running again.
Thanks for letting people know!
Updates are also posted here:
Rather than what looks to be an unproven pet project of some developer. If nobody is paying for it, there are no guarantees of uptime or support.
It's pay what you want. The project is running for three years already, let's see how things go with time.
Apologies for the long downtime. The issue is being resolved, see here for updates:
That looks amazing.
There is also the ePrivacy Directive. From what at the moment seems to me (it changes), it is in principle possible to make a GDPR compliant web analytics SaaS. But it might not be possible to avoid compliance banners given the current ePrivacy Directive. But most people don't know that thing exists.
Hmm but is leaving your data with Microsoft much better than with Google? I'd say no.
Thanks for the clarification. We have: https://github.com/ihucos/counter.dev-selfhost/releases :-)
It's on another repo because for self-hosting we "white label" it stripping the logo and so on.
Hello from the competition :-) It looks nice. I like how the main value proposition is actually clearly written out and basically can't not be not read. What I'd like is a live demo where you can quickly see what you get.
<3
Hey ho, I am the maintainer of counter.dev. Hmm what you mean with release. It did got two times on the hacker news front page and there is a self hosting golang executable in a seperate but linked github repo as a github release.
What you mean with release :-) Le't see if I can do it.
It is done :-) https://github.com/ihucos/counter.dev-selfhost
It is done :-) https://github.com/ihucos/counter.dev-selfhost
Ha, sorry for the spam. I did something similar: https://datandy.com/
Coming trough: https://github.com/ihucos/plash 90% done and useful
We have a new Apple releasing their new iPhones to a crowd in awe. Only that now it's actually serious.
Right, and being sessionStorage it's cleared on browser close, and the next time I visit I will be counted as another daily unique visitor right?
No! There are a few rudimentary mechanisms on top of each other if one of them fails as you described. The /track endpoint sets up http caching. So if sessionStorage fails, you still have that. Then there is also inspecting document.referrer. If it is the page you are already on, then it's definitely not a unique visit.
I get regular user feedbacks for all kind of stuff and unique visits being counted double was not reported once since now.
(or why not just a cookie)
Because cookies are considered "bad". But technically basically just saving a boolean value on the cookie would not be worse from a privacy perspective than using sessionStorage for a boolean value.
I personally would rather have the pages I visit use a self-hosted solution gather everything I do, instead of a third-party getting little data from many sites I use. If this script is used across many sites it can be checked server-side against my IP to get my usage. I can never verify what logs they keep and for how long.
That is a general problem with externally hosted services. You can audit the source code (https://github.com/ihucos/counter.dev) but there is not way to verify that my deployment is as stated. I heard a podcast once that web hosters could guarantee that a deployment is in a specific way and contains a specific code base revision. But such solutions unfortunately do not exist. If you really want to be sure self hosting is the way to go (but somewhat cumbersome)
Thanks, I sometimes have troubles explaining how it works but this is it! That is basically how it works (There are some hidden extras though)
I think mostly we are actually on the same page. One thing I would add in is that starting the whole web analytics endeavour from scratch needs a lot of work, testing and iterations. I am actually thinking that it would make sense for counter.dev to offer an API so that you can use that as a backend middleware or in some other way.
One of the above suits me as a user; [...]
That might be true. But as roughly said let's say that for over 99% of people, just reading the term "tracking script" already switches off their brain. If you start with "code base specific middleware addition" or "deploy your own tracking http proxy" or something like this you only have knowledgeable techies which well, to be fair could be fair to a more specialised product.
[...] the other as an entrepreneur.
With hat thinking for me it wouldn't make much sense to offer and maintain the service for basically free since some years already. At least I can cover the hosting costs. So yes, but also a little bit no :-)
Yep, I believe technically you can get better results with such an approach. It's just much more hard to do and the tooling for this approach is not as mature as client side tracking.
The main hurdle is that every code base would need a different kind of integration. Or with a proxy you loose overall performance. And complexity would also be increased. But as said more accurate tracking could be possible. Has all pros and cons :-)
That is a complete valid technical solution if you can go trough the effort to do it. I'd recommend GoAccess, looks good but I have not used it myself. It's just that it can be cumbersome and a lot of people have websites but are not techies for example.
Ha, thanks I did not know site. Will submit counter.dev to it. Counter.dev is hosted in Frankfurt, Germany and tries to comply with German laws.
Wasn’t part of the drive to client side analytics an effort to improve data quality, [...]
Interesting, I did not know that narrative. But what I can tell from subjective experience is that bots is'nt so much a problem with client side analytics. counter.dev filters them out by not logging very short page views by the way. For me the bigger challenge with client side analytics is not being able to track clients which are using a tracking blocker. Which I guess is the end users right to use (I even use uBlock origin myself). But if you start missing roughly 50% of page visits it starts getting an issue for web site owners. The data does not need to be detailed, just accurate enough.
Web analytics on hosters... yeah if they fit your use case then great, but for me that is vendor lock in and I would avoid it if possible and web analytics is more or less a topic for itself that I'd prefer to leave with a specialised solution. But obviously I am biased haha.
Web analytics solutions for self hosting without using javascript is not plug and play and as easy to integrate. So if you have log files maybe its easier. If not you need a middleware for your specific web framework. Or some kind of proxy to route your entire traffic which is not good for performance. I don't know, how would you do it?
Somebody mentioned GoAccess. I haven't tried it but it looks good imo.
I actually agree. And with more and more (Personal impression) users using blockers like uBlock origin the meaningfulness of data collected with JS gets eroded. But if there is no alternative then what some web analytics providers provide (counter.dev doesn't) is means to try to circumvent the blockers (For example suggesting proxies: https://plausible.io/docs/proxy/introduction). This leads to what I would call an unhealthy ecosystem.
That being said log files are not the ultimate solutions as non-techies would have more difficulties handling with them.
So I actually agree the current situation is suboptimal. Spinning this thought more I see "Honest" analytics players being pressured to circumvent the blockers to stay relevant but ultimately the blockers have the upper hand and its a game I don't want to play so yeahhh....
A consensus between blockers and web analytics providers that tracking really just the simplest metrics is important for e.G. a yoga studio with its website might actually be difficult because... ...users might just choose the most aggressive blockers because more is always better.
I am eager to see how it will play out. But generally it all goes slow.