mataroa-blog
Suggestion: Reduce multiple analytic entries for same "user" or "session"
Right now every page load counts as a view, that means a user that refreshes the page multiple times will show up as multiple views.
As a relatively easy and mostly privacy preserving solution the analytics model can be augmented with a unique attribute (called session maybe?) that would be calculated by concat-ing the user's ip address, their browser's agent, the current date rounded to the lowest hour (or quarter even), hashed, and only the first x characters of the hash kept (depending on the hash).
The cases of collision are relatively small, and can be further reduced by keeping a larger part of the hash, or even the whole hash.
@sirodoht does this sound like something you might be interested in?
That sounds a potential future feature we could implement. The only concerns I have are related to introducing that level of complexity, and for something potentially not very insightful. For example, I suppose, many of the analytics records might be bots or web crawlers, so maybe it's worth handling those first somehow?
