SoylentNews

SoylentNews Site Stats: June 27th, 2014

posted by NCommander on Friday June 27 2014, @06:15PM   
from the finally-an-NCommander-post-with-<1k-words! dept.

So, given we've recently managed to find a good middle ground on the subscription front, I thought it would be nice to end the week with a lighthearted subject most of you care about.

STATISTICS!

As most of you are likely aware, we've been running piWik on SN for the last few weeks to get a better idea of what our general traffic looks like. We've learned quite a few interesting things from it, and I figured the community would love to take a look at the report itself. So, without further ado: piWik Statistics Report for mid-June. (warning: PDF file, the HTML output had far too many images to easily copy it off piWik and rehost it somewhere else, and there was no ASCII report that I could find).So, hopefully now most of you have taken a good look through the PDF. Its been fascinating watching the various trends of traffic, as well as getting an idea of the breakdown of mobile/desktop, various OS usage, and so-forth. First, a couple of notes:

• For whatever reason, piWik groups Ubuntu separately from Linux, and it shows up as "Unknown" in the OS families list. I think this is a side-effect from one of the plugins we're using, but I'm not 100% sure.
• Second, there are no referrals listed in the report; I specifically excluded them. There are two simple reasons: we get almost no inbound traffic from third-party sources (our top referral was Google searches at 114), and secondly, a fair number of users here have custom launch portals for themselves (basically an HTML page with links), who, due to our virtually non-existent referrals, show up in the top 25.
• HTTPS traffic is excluded due to certificate issues, as there are users who have DNT set. If you use NoScript, it sets DNT automatically, even if you enable scripts globally. Furthermore, my original post about non-JS users being excluded was in error, there is a hidden image that cause those users to show up.
• A few pages on the site don't include the footer template, causing hits to be slightly lower than they should be because of that.

So, with any bunch of data, we can start to draw some reasonable conclusions from it. Here's what I got, I'd love to hear your opinions below:

• Slashcode's internal statistics monitor is badly out of touch of reality; it reports our traffic is 80% higher than piWik does. This might be an artificat of bitrot, varnish, or something else entirely.
• I was kinda shocked to see how much of our traffic is based in the United States, I honestly though we had a more even distribution.
• The lack of referrals is concerning; right now, we're roughly stable with the users in our community, but if you don't already know we exist, you aren't going to find us easily.

There's probably a lot more I could draw from this data, but I don't want to color the communities' impressions beside stating the obvious, so I'd like to hear what you think about it, and then go from there.

• Re:HTTPS usersRe:HTTPS users (Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Friday June 27 2014, @06:58PM

  by Ethanol-fueled (2792) on Friday June 27 2014, @06:58PM (#60992) Homepage

  Wasn't piWik supposed to be a voluntary thing? We have a lot of paranoids (and lazy people like me) here who aren't too hot with the idea of installing monitoring software on our computers. It stands to reason that, if people are reluctant to install piWik, then the results between the two aren't gonna jibe.

  Or maybe I don't know what I'm talking about, and somebody could provide a better explanation?

  Parent

• Re:HTTPS usersRe:HTTPS users (Score: 3, Funny) by NCommander on Friday June 27 2014, @07:13PM

  by NCommander (2) <michael@casadevall.pro> on Friday June 27 2014, @07:13PM (#61007) Homepage Journal

  piWik is a server side package that tracks users via a bit of code at the bottom of every page load (you can see it with View Source). You can opt-out of it via the link on the FAQ page or in the site news bar, or by setting your DNT header.

  --
  Still always moving

  Parent

  • Re:HTTPS users(Score: 1) by Justin Case on Tuesday July 01 2014, @12:21PM

    by Justin Case (4239) on Tuesday July 01 2014, @12:21PM (#62425) Journal

    Because the https RSS feed still gives links as http, I hand-edit the URL back to https before loading it. My browser does not load http objects into an https page, because that would leak data via the referer header.

    And you shouldn't have to even ask if I'm going to give the big bad world control of my browser. No scripts for me thank you.

    So, you're not going to see me in piWik, not even with your <noscript><p><img src="http://stats.soylentnews.org/piwik/piwik.php?idsite=1"...

    Try your web logs! (Does anyone still know they exist?)

    Also, you'll have no way to measure how long I stay on the page. A few zeros will pull down an average pretty quickly.

    Parent

• Re:HTTPS usersRe:HTTPS users (Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 27 2014, @08:03PM

  by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 27 2014, @08:03PM (#61043)

  > Or maybe I don't know what I'm talking about, and somebody could provide a better explanation?

  Story of your life dude, perfectly summed up in one sentence.

  Parent

  • Re:HTTPS usersRe:HTTPS users (Score: 1, Troll) by Ethanol-fueled on Friday June 27 2014, @08:57PM

    by Ethanol-fueled (2792) on Friday June 27 2014, @08:57PM (#61082) Homepage

    Gargle on my balls, sacksuck.

    Parent

    • Re:HTTPS users(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 27 2014, @09:57PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 27 2014, @09:57PM (#61132)

      > Gargle on my balls, sacksuck.

      And that is why your claim to be a "professional troll" is just a delusion.
      Professionals don't lose their shit when they get pwned by an amateur.

      Parent