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Lewis Goddard edited this page Jan 25, 2020 · 4 revisions

We'd like to move away from Google Analytics. We launched our blog without any tracking, and we'd like to get as close to that point here as well, with a few requirements:

  • Download stats
    • Browser/OS info for interesting segmentation info (i.e. Windows 10, Chrome 71)
    • Version of OS being downloaded (i.e. 5.1-20200123)
    • Payment amount ← Do we need this if we can get it from Stripe? Maybe just a "paid" boolean?
    • Download method (torrent vs. direct link)
  • Page hits (Helps measure overall traffic) ← Cloudflare doesn't distinguish between domains or give much info
    • Page loaded
    • Referrer
    • Language
    • Browser/OS info?
  • Front-end for viewing data
    • Honestly I'm fine manually querying things to start
    • Eventually a simple dashboard with authentication and some pretty charts :)

Ideas re: how to keep it privacy-respecting as possible:

  • Never store plain IPs; hash them? Would prevent easily seeing IPs, but wouldn't prevent checking a specific IP against the dataset
  • No cookies; trade "perfect" per-user tracking for more privacy
  • As little JS as needed; lean on server-side to do most of the analytics and JS to fill in any more info

Other notes

  • Should probably be hosted on its own subdomain, i.e. x.elementary.io
  • Query/ping it from main domain, blog domain, appcenter domain
  • Fill in relevant data via GET attributes? Is that leaky?
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