[pydotorg-www] Analytics

[Michael Foord]

On 25/04/2010 21:35, Georg Brandl wrote:
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> Am 25.04.2010 22:25, schrieb Michael Foord:
>    
>>>>> At work I went to a recent talk on Google Analytics, which provides an
>>>>> impressive number of analyses to track where people are coming from,
>>>>> what queries they're using, how long they stay on average, etc.  But
>>>>> visitors are only recorded if their browser supports JavaScript, and
>>>>> dumping that information into Google raises privacy concerns.
>>>>>
>>>>>            
>>>> -1 on Google Analytics, for the privacy reasons. I don't believe you
>>>> need JavaScript in the browser for it to do tracking, but with
>>>> JavaScript, even more information gets collected.
>>>>
>>>> Here in Germany, it is the law that users have to opt in to have
>>>> personal data being collected, and IP addresses are considered personal
>>>> information. So strictly speaking, even a plain webserver log without
>>>> user consent is against the law (the one exception being operational
>>>> necessity). This isn't really being followed in practice, but we should
>>>> not give personal data to anybody else (aggregated data is fine).
>>>>
>>>>          
>>> I also don't really see the need to put something in every python.org page
>>> when the webserver collects enough data just fine.
>>>
>>>        
>> The extra information that google analytics (or a similar service) gives
>> you is the ability to track how visitors use the site (what path they
>> take - which pages they tend to exit the site on, and so on). If we
>> really wanted to track how "user friendly" certain parts of our site are
>> then it could be extremely useful, and not information we could *easily*
>> get from the server logs alone.
>>      
> Why?  Assuming not too much IP duplication, this should be easy to extract
> through the HTTP referer, or even through tracking requests of a single IP.
> Or am I missing something?
>
>    

Well, first you have to rewrite the code (and some kind of UI even if 
through the command line) that is already in analytics... So yes 
possible in theory, not likely in practise (unless someone does write an 
advanced log file analyser in Python).

>> I doubt we have anyone wanting to use this information though.
>>      
> Exactly.
>
>    
Much more to the point.

Michael

> Georg
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