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:
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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 27 2014, @07:11PM
If you collect this every month it would be shiny if you made it publicly available and preserve archives. As a more nerdy folk tracking things like OS and browser adoption could prove interesting in the future.
(Score: 2) by NCommander on Friday June 27 2014, @07:20PM
I was actually planning on running a post about doing something like this, perhaps keep an archive of how traffic and OS usage changes over time, with a monthly stats update post, though I'd need to reask the community to do so, we only asked permission to run piwik for a few weeks.
Still always moving
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 27 2014, @07:39PM
On the face of it I see no problem with gathering aggregate statistics . Tracking individual users is another question entirely.
(Score: 3, Informative) by NCommander on Friday June 27 2014, @07:42PM
We have to do the later to generate the former :-/ (there's a lot of information in piwik which isn't in the report; we purge out IPs and most other information after 7 days to limit how much we collect)
Still always moving
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 28 2014, @03:01AM
That's a decent compromise. It's not your job to write piwik, but I wonder if there is a way of filtering the data that goes into it, and dropping the ip addresses and other unique identifiers right at the source. It would be harder if not impossible to measure things like session time or unique visitors, but a number of indicators (eg country of visitor, OS, browser, hit-count, time) could still be available.
(Score: 1) by goodie on Friday June 27 2014, @07:43PM
I think it's a fantastic idea. Heck, if several sites did this we could aggregate the data and actually have an idea about these things rather than a guess. That's why when you were talking about the subscription and access to the SN db for querying I saw a use for this for the same type of purpose (although I don't know what is tracked actually in the SN db...).