GoatCounter Files

If you're enjoying GoatCounter and haven't donated yet, then now would be a good time.

In short, I'm out of a job and out of money, and I'm hoping to raise at least €1,000 for basic living expenses so I can (hopefully) sort things over the next month or two. While this seems a lot, there's a few thousand users who logged in during the last month (plus an unknown number of people self hosting); if everyone would make a (one-time!) donation of a few dimes then that would basically cover things.

As you may have heard, the job market has been been pretty brutal over the last year, and finding a job has been a near full-time occupation for months – also turns out that CV with mainly software development is not all that useful for lot of things outside software dev :-/

I really hate to Jimmy Wales people about this and it's rather embarrassing. Thus far donations have more or less covered hosting costs and I'm okay with that as such and wouldn't necessarily expect more, but it would make a huge difference.

Oh, and if you know if any jobs I might be a good fit for then now might be a good time to let me know about too 😅

https://github.com/sponsors/arp242

Many thanks, Martin

And then now for the actual changelog:

This release requires Go 1.21.

Features:

• Quite a few tables are rewritten to a more efficient format. For small to medium instances this will take a few minutes at the most, but if you have very large instances this may take a few hours. It also requires enough free disk space to rewrite the hits table.

If you want to run steps manually then you can view the migration with:

  % goatcounter db migrate -show 2023-05-16-1-hits

Or if you use PostgreSQL:

  % goatcounter db migrate -show -db postgresql+dbname=goatcounter 2023-05-16-1-hits

• The User-Agent header is no longer stored; only the browser and system parsed out of there. It's pretty reliable, and especially mobile browser User-Agents are ridiculously unique. It was always stored only "in case the detection got it horribly wrong", but this has never been needed.

• Add proxy option in serve -tls flag, to give a hint that a secure connection will be used, so we know what value to use for the cookie secure/samesite flags.

• Add experimental "dark mode"; this needs to be enabled explicitly in the user settings. I need help to make this decent: https://github.com/arp242/goatcounter/issues/586#issuecomment-1287995673

• Show difference of pageviews compared to previous period on the dashboard.

• Make setup of a new installation a bit easier: instead of telling people to use the CLI, display a form when the database is 100% empty.

Fixes:

• Collecting stats was broken when "sessions" was disabled in the site settings.

• Use navigator.sendBeacon by default in count.js. This will allow using click events on things like PDF files and external URLs:

• Sometimes the order of pages was wrong when using PostgreSQL.

• Few smaller bugfixes.