[Distutils] Inflated download counts

[Dustin Oprea]

Is there any way that we can use the user-agent to either identify users or
identify mirrors?

Can we pass a flag or signature from "pip"? It won't reflect downloads from
website, but this probably won't affect the numbers much. In this case, we
might just reword it to "pip Downloads".

This is a distressing issue. It doesn't seem like package owners have any
usable usage data.

Dustin Oprea
On Oct 25, 2013 1:49 PM, "Donald Stufft" <donald at stufft.io> wrote:

> Mostly new packages will get roughly 2-3k of downloads from what appears
> to be
> mirroring infrastructure. I’m hesitant to mess with the traffic numbers at
> all because
> I don’t want them to be inaccurate *and* artificial vs just inaccurate
> (assuming you
> think it’s the number of people downloading your project).
>
> On Oct 25, 2013, at 1:22 PM, Dustin Oprea <dustin at randomingenuity.com>
> wrote:
>
> It seems like the download counts on PyPI aren't accurate. Though the
> really useful packages seem to have higher numbers than the packages that
> only apply to a specific target audience, I'm fairly certain that the
> numbers are more affected by robots and such than actual users.
>
> Recently I started a service that requires membership. In the last month,
> PyPI reports 3000 downloads of the client, yet Google Analytics only
> reports a handful of visits to the website. I have even less membership
> signups (as expected, so soon after launch). Why are the download counts so
> inflated?
>
> What has to be done to get this to be accurate?
>
> I've included two screenshots of PyPI and GA.
>
>
>
> Dustin Oprea
>  <Selection_001.png><Selection_002.png>
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> -----------------
> Donald Stufft
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> DCFA
>
>
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