We use our own Piwik installation for analytics on TRAC access
Table of Contents
Projects at sourceforge have no access to the weblogs of the hosted applications. Instead SF recommends their Piwik installation to monitor access of the projects web resources.
We gave it a try a few days ago, but realized soon that the Piwik installation here at SF is not usable at the time, due to many bugs. Therefore we setup our own Piwik installation on a private server of the projects webadmin. So the data we collect here is in our hand and access have only two members of smartmontools developer team.
Purpose
With the web analytics we see:
- Which tickets are viewed at most
- What questions (search terms) you people have
- How you navigate on the website to find the answers
- Which pages are never called
- Which external pages link to us
- Which links you follow when leaving the website
These insights will help us to improve the wiki content and navigation.
Our configuration to protect your privacy
Piwik has similiar features like Google-Analytics, but with Piwik we collect the data on our own server. So we can decide on our own, how to use it. We promise to use it only for the above listed purposes and that we will not give away any of the data to a third party.
We will not store the data forever! We plan to delete all data older than 3 months with a cronjob, that runs at the 1st of each month. So the recording of your visit will be stored for maximal 4 months.
If your visit shouldn't be recorded at all, you may opt-out from the data collection.
As further action we use the plugin AnonymizeIP to mask the IP at tracker runtime to set zeros for the last two bytes of the IP. And the tracker cookie will only be used for 4 hours and not for 2 years, which is the default..
config.ini.php:
[Tracker] ; by default, the IP mask sets the last byte to 0 ; we set the last two bytes to 0 ; ip_address_mask_length = 1 ip_address_mask_length = 2 ; by default, the Piwik tracking cookie expires in 2 years ; we reduce this to 4 hours ; cookie_expire = 63072000 cookie_expire = 14400
