[fab] Re: Firefox splash page tracker

[Josh Boyer]

On Wed, 2006-10-04 at 23:56 -0500, Robert 'Bob' Jensen wrote:
> seth vidal wrote:
> > On Thu, 2006-10-05 at 00:16 -0400, Christopher Blizzard wrote:
> >> seth vidal wrote:
> >>> On Wed, 2006-10-04 at 23:39 -0400, Christopher Blizzard wrote:
> >>>> seth vidal wrote:
> >>>>> hey guys,
> >>>>>  The goal of this tracker is to determine how many folks we have
> >>>>> installing fedora, right?
> >>>>>
> >>>>> If we can assume that it is likely that a user will be using
> >>>>> yum/pirut/puplet in a default install then we should be able to gather
> >>>>> the information on how many folks are using it (hence installing fedora)
> >>>>> from the mirrors.fedoraproject.org mirrorlist generating program. It'll
> >>>>> track hits against it and we can then mine those logs for the number of
> >>>>> users w/o obtaining much other information than 'they used
> >>>>> yum/pirut/puplet'.
> >>>>>
> >>>>> It also requires nothing of us other than putting a log watcher on
> >>>>> fedoraproject.org.
> >>>> Does that track unique users or just hits?  Hits isn't that interesting. 
> >>>>   Unique visitors is.
> >>> it's just a url running under apache. It tracks what apache tracks
> >>> whenever someone hits a page. So, yes, definitely tracking unique
> >>> visitors.
> >> There are only two ways that I know of to track unique visitors.  1. 
> >> Cookies or 2. Explicit registration (or registration behind the scenes.)
> >>
> >> I suspect you're thinking of unique IPs (as greg mentions in other 
> >> email?)  Or do pup + friends track using cookies?
> > 
> > Then you're correct, we're not tracking anything besides unique ips. 
> > 
> > -sv
> > 
> 
> Not knowing exactly what numbers are wanted from this task is making 
> this hard. I would think for total number of users/IPs the yum solution 
> would be much better as those without a GUI installed would never get 
> counted, if only desktop users are the number that is interesting then 
> the Splash Page is best I guess.

I like the yum solution better too, but it still won't get you what
you're looking for.  Like Christopher said, you need cookies or
registration to truly get the number of users.  Unique IPs are
misleading because of proxys and NAT.  There are large corporations that
use Fedora and you'll never get unique IPs out of them for all users.

josh