Hi!
sajolida:
> As part of #12562: "Have a web analytics platform" I started playing
> with Piwik to do web analytics on the activity on our website.
Cool! I don't read the UX mailing list often enough these times and feel
ashamed that it took me two months to find out about this great work
you've been doing. I'll try to improve on this!
> It almost doesn't feel like free software. I'm jealous, ha ha!
Ahem ;)
> I don't see ourselves using anything else.
That's a clear statement.
> a. Ask boum.org to deactivate IP anonymization. We could import the logs
> daily and then get rid of the original logs and rely instead on the IP
> anonymization feature of Piwik [3]. It's not a hack but serious stuff
> build for users with legal requirements so I expect it to be well
> integrated and doing what it should.
>
> Downsides:
>
> - I'm not sure boum.org will be able or ready to have IP in their logs.
> - Relying on logs of activity done through the Tor network might not
> provide a perfect way of singling out people. For example, I expect
> people using the same exit node to visit our website to still be
> considered as a single visit.
> - We might still want to keep and analyze the raw logs for some
> data that Piwik wouldn't provide us. For example, until now I didn't
> find how to replace our boot statistics: see the hits on
> security/index.en.atom only by libwww-perl. It's probably possible
> but I can say it yet. Or to count the hits on the hash tags that I
> used to flag the activity related to the donation campaign. But for
> this, there are other mechanisms of Piwik to do this even better next
> year.
>
> [3]: https://piwik.org/docs/privacy/
>
> b. Rely on the JavaScript. Again we could rely on the IP anonymization
> feature of Piwik to keep sleeping at night. It's not clear to me whether
> people using the same exit node would be singled out with this technique
> (relying on some cookie maybe).
>
> Downsides:
>
> - We won't have analytics from people without JavaScript.
> - The JavaScript might not give us all the analytics we need.
> For example the hits on the security upgrade feed by Tails Upgrader.
>
> I'm not sure what's best and it would anyway involve a more political
> discussion about what information we want from our users. Happy to
> gather impression and hints on what would such a discussion imply but
> I'm not sure here is the right place to have it.
I dont' know where to have this discussion, but here is some input of
mine. I've looked at Piwik's demo in the meantime and tried to figure
out how much information we would get out of non-anonymized logs.
- possibly we'd know how many people access the website from Tails or
throught the Tor network, and how many access it through the "normal"
Internet which could be interesting. However, I suspect that through the
user-agent we will already have this information
- we'd probably not be able to profit much from the location feature,
because a lot of traffic will be Tor exit nodes anyway. So having
non-anonymized logs will still make it hard to differentiate as
TorBrowser users are supposed to share the same web fingerprint, right?
With or without anonymized logs:
- we'd know which pages/languages get the most hits
- we'd know at which dates which pages get more hits
- we might get to know more about how our donation campaign works
- we might get out more information on referrers: where do people come
from, what did they look for
- if we use the Javascript feature, we will set a cookie on users
browsers and we'll be able to better follow them (entry point, exit
point, path). This will not be possible if we simply use Apache log
feeding from my understanding. (see
https://piwik.org/faq/general/faq_18254/ about cookies)
To me it looks like this is what we want and we would not get it out of
non anonymized Apache logs. This would require more research, insight
and discussion obviously.
> Next steps
> ==========
>
> - I'll try to do useful stuff through Piwik for #12082 "Analyze the
> results of the donation campaign" over the summer.
Did you use Piwik for this in the end?
Cheers!
u.
