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posted by
NCommander
on Friday June 27 2014, @06:15PM
from the finally-an-NCommander-post-with-<1k-words! dept.
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:
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.
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It is so very hard to be an
on-your-own-take-care-of-yourself-because-there-is-no-one-else-to-do-it-for-you
grown-up.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Friday June 27 2014, @09:53PM
Which doesn't mean users don't use it anyway, by conscious use.
However it is also a reasonable guess that a high percentage of the users here uses NoScript and/or DNT. If I understood the summary correctly, those are not counted either.
Maybe a poll about that subject might be a good idea. While not as accurate as actual measurements, it might give at least a hint at how many users use https/NoScript/DNT.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by elf on Friday June 27 2014, @11:19PM
Do a lot of people use things like Ghostery too? This would block pwiki (I just noticed my browser does). I think an 80% difference is too large to be caused by bad slashcode. I think something else is at play here too.
I noticed there was a flag to opt in to the analytics, were AC's automatically in or out? (as they can't choose settings)
(Score: 2) by NCommander on Saturday June 28 2014, @12:07AM
The flag is set as a local cookie, its not attached to a user account. For cookie allergic users, the DNT flag is honored as well.
Still always moving
(Score: 2) by mrider on Saturday June 28 2014, @03:41AM
I for one am probably screwing up the stats. I use ABP, No Script, Ghostery, and Self-Destructing Cookies. I have all those set to allow this site 100%, but it sounds like you still get skewed stats...
Doctor: "Do you hear voices?"
Me: "Only when my bluetooth is charged."