Re: Counter & Statistics (fwd)

---------

Pamela Greene (pgreene@optics.rochester.edu)
Wed, 13 Aug 1997 13:30:32 -0400 (EDT)

> # useful for me to know how many times each search engine will referre web
> # surfers to this URL.
> #
> # Do you think you could activate a counter:
> # - to let FAQ maintainers know how many times their faq pages has been
> # accessed
> # - to give FAQ maintainers statistics about the main links by which their
> # pages have been retreived ?
>
> These are excellent ideas. I don't do it today but I suspect that others
> would like to see the same thing. Question is, how to do it right ?
> Just put up a page that lets you query the faqs.org access_log and
> referer_log ? Generate a summary each month for each FAQ and mail it to
> the authors ? I think it should be done. The question now is what is the
> right way ?

I vote NO to the email idea. I would much rather have a WWW page
which presents basic stats for my FAQ (either using a CGI script for
up-to-the-minute stats, or just compiled nightly). I could go and
look at it whenever I'm curious, but I'm not required to bother about
it at all; likewise, Kent, you don't have to deal with email
"subscriptions".

What stats? Depends on what your server collects. Total number of
hits, sure. Hourly breakdown of hits? Probably not worth the time to
compile it. Breakdown by browser type? Could be interesting. As for
counting referring sites, that could be done without loss of privacy
by only counting search engines and major directories: "26 hits from
Yahoo, 19 from Webcrawler, 37 from the Virtual Library, ..., and 35
from other sources".

-- 
- Pam Greene
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