🚀 go-pugleaf

In alt.folklore.urban Abigail <abi...@fnx.com> wrote:

> Foo! Basically, you cannot track the visitor through a site. HTTP is a
> stateless protocol. You can try to get some results with cookies, but
> that doesn't work if cookies are disabled (which can easily be done by
> a proxy), if the user uses multiple browsers, if a browser is used by
> various people (think public accessable terminals like in libraries and
> universtities), or if there are proxies involved meaning that only
> certain page visits register hits at the server.

I don't understand this obsession with cookies.  Cookies are irrelevant to
this discussion.  Most browsers report the referring URL to the server
when linking to another page.  Voila, you can track a visitor through a
site.

I do it all the time - all of my web pages trigger an SSI that logs the IP
address/fqdn, date, browser type, and referring url for each access.  I
use this to look at my logs to track user movements through my web site.
Since it's an SSI, it's entirely invisible to the user - no cgi calls in
the source visible to the browser, no cookies, no java, no whatever.  I
know who visits my site (I know the ip address, at least), and I usually
know the URL they linked from, because the http definition includes making
this information available to the server.  Period.  Not a damn thing to do
with cookies.  Let's get over the cookie hysteria, in this regard, at
least. 

The unmassaged server logs I've seen log all hits to everything - that's
every single URL asked for in the HTML source (images, whatever). But
it's not hard to filter out everything but page URL's.  Which are they
calling "hits?"  Hopefully page hits.  A counter program is counting page
hits, or something that is functionaly equivalent.

But people will often reload a page several times - for a variety of
reasons.  That inflates the count.  More and more people are looking at
the pages via a proxy server.  That means that a lot of legitimate "hits"
of a page are not being seen at all by the server.  Given AOL, et al, I'd
say that the latter more than makes up for the former, depending on how
quickly a proxy expires its cache.

I've personaly looked at the pathfinder page(s) about twenty times, most
of those via my ISP's proxy.

[least relevant froups trimmed from followups]

-Keith "I'm watching" Ellis