Statistics Please

December 23, 2006 5:51 PM

Matt, can I have a pony for Christmas? Nothing too fancy, just some public statistics. Boingboing, for example, uses AWStats, which provides a delicious smörgåsbord of information. It doesn't sound too difficult to use, I've set up similar things on sites of my own.
posted by Spike to feature requests at 5:51 PM (33 comments total)

I thought about this earlier, when the comments in something I posted to the blue got me wondering about what the browser share here is. I went looking for public stats, but to no avail.
posted by Spike at 5:53 PM on December 23, 2006

what the browser share here is.

Guessing:

Firefox = 90%
Safari = 5%
Opera = 4%
IE/other = 1%

Pulled from the Department of Statistics of My Ass.
posted by loquacious at 6:16 PM on December 23, 2006

You mean like this stuff?
posted by interrobang at 6:16 PM on December 23, 2006

This is pretty interesting, too.
posted by interrobang at 6:17 PM on December 23, 2006 [1 favorite]

Can we track how many times quonsar has been banned?
posted by eriko at 6:40 PM on December 23, 2006

Mu.

quonsar's state of bannination exists in duality much like Schroedinger's Cat. Only upon observation of the eigenfilter state does the duality collapse.
posted by loquacious at 6:44 PM on December 23, 2006

Interrobang, I was actually looking at waxpancake's stats just yesterday, but unfortunately they stop at June '06, and aren't very detailed (only posts and comments).
posted by Spike at 7:13 PM on December 23, 2006

If you publish statistics, you're going to invite referrer spamming -- pointless, automated, bandwidth-gobbling, resource-hogging hits to your site in order to get into the referrer [a.k.a. 'referer'] logs in an attempt to raise site ranks and possibly get a few clickthroughs.

My strong recommendation would be if you're going to publish statistics, don't include referrer logs, and don't use a standard statistics package that some twat will mistake for something that does include referrer logs. This spamming is scattershot and automated, generally uses zombie PCs -- don't expect them to sensibly exclude your site just because you don't really publish referrer logs. They've got a lot of stolen resources at their disposal and they're not very careful about how they use them.
posted by George_Spiggott at 8:27 PM on December 23, 2006

Matt uses Google Analytics. He's got all the stats he needs. Making a large website's stats public is pretty rare, for the referer problem but just in general is a pain in the ass for little gain. If you just want browser stats, why not ask? (loquacious, you're full of shit. Joke as much as you want but there is no way IE is as low as 1% on any public web site. Go look at boingboing, they're at 50% Firefox, 25% IE, 12.5% Safari, and 12.5% everything else. I imagine metafilter is roughly the same.)
posted by Rhomboid at 9:03 PM on December 23, 2006

loquacious, you're full of shit.

*scrolls up*

Pulled from the Department of Statistics of My Ass.
posted by loquacious at 8:16 PM CST on December 23

That would make sense, then.
posted by Spike at 9:12 PM on December 23, 2006

You forgot to say dick.
posted by Kraftmatic Adjustable Cheese at 9:17 PM on December 23, 2006

Weren't you buying another account for these posts?
posted by smackfu at 9:20 PM on December 23, 2006

This is not the outlet you are looking for.
posted by monju_bosatsu at 9:32 PM on December 23, 2006

Hold down the apple key, and press "q" at the same time.
posted by interrobang at 9:58 PM on December 23, 2006

Rhomboid: If you just want browser stats, why not ask?

Well, I wanted browser stats this time. In general, I just love poring over tables of statistics, to see what kinds of interesting information I can glean from them. Besides, it would be free, and I figured it couldn't hurt to ask. How real a problem are the referral bots, and how hard would it be to thwart them?

Yeah, I'm a nerd. I enjoy it, though.
posted by Spike at 11:13 PM on December 23, 2006

If metafilter is anything like another similar site, then the statistics will be:

Firefox: 60%
IE: 27%
Safari: 7%
Opera: 2%
posted by seanyboy at 12:55 AM on December 24, 2006

I don't keep access log files at all, so I can't do awstats anymore. I use Google Analytics and frankly I'm not protective of it at all. If there was a way to make them public, I would.

I seem to recall the browser use was right around 45%/45%/7%/3% for FF/IE/Safari/etc when I checked it over the summer.
posted by mathowie at 1:19 AM on December 24, 2006 [1 favorite]

45/45? Oh the humanity.
posted by bob sarabia at 1:21 AM on December 24, 2006

I don't keep access log files at all, so I can't do awstats anymore. I use Google Analytics and frankly I'm not protective of it at all. If there was a way to make them public, I would.

Take some screenshots.
posted by delmoi at 2:02 AM on December 24, 2006

A Firefox/IE dead heat? Has Diebold infiltrated Google?
posted by wendell at 3:34 AM on December 24, 2006

I'm surprised IE isn't higher than 45% — lots of users browse MeFi at work, where IE is likely to be the only choice.
posted by matthewr at 4:08 AM on December 24, 2006

If there was a way to make them public, I would.

It is possible to create a Google account and grant it view-only access to certain domains in your Google Analytics account. I don't know what the rules and technical restrictions are on sharing a Google account around like that, though.
posted by chrismear at 6:23 AM on December 24, 2006

This thread is useless without images.
posted by blue_beetle at 8:22 AM on December 24, 2006

It is possible to create a Google account and grant it view-only access to certain domains in your Google Analytics account. I don't know what the rules and technical restrictions are on sharing a Google account around like that, though.

I'd be surprised if they have a security policy designed around this kind of workaround. It wouldn't look too good when "mefistats" starts a blog consisting of Goatse images, or starts using gmail to send spam or something...
posted by arto at 2:15 PM on December 24, 2006

I just looked at December stats and it still seems about the same. 43% firefox/43% IE (just barely with FF winning), then safari, opera, and others.

On the OS front, 80% are still using windows, 16% on mac, and the rest being linux variants.
posted by mathowie at 3:18 PM on December 24, 2006

On the OS front, 80% are still using windows, 16% on mac, and the rest being linux variants.

Ahem. I am not running a Linux variant.
posted by eriko at 4:04 PM on December 24, 2006

Perhaps, but the Imsai 8080 is too much of an outlier for him to mention.
posted by George_Spiggott at 4:54 PM on December 24, 2006

Interrobang. I just fell for that apple "q" thing. I hope your happy.
posted by cascando at 5:53 PM on December 24, 2006

I was thinking about making this very request. I'd love to be able to peruse different and strange MeFi stats. But not obvious stuff, numbers of posts and comments are all well and good, but I'd like to see weird shit, like what time of day gets the most favorited comments? How many times a month does the tagline phrase "Metafilter:" get used? Or what user made the most comments on a day to day basis.

Useless information to be sure, but if we are to have public stats, let's track stuff that will keep other sites scratching their heads in confusion.
posted by quin at 7:27 PM on December 24, 2006

I just looked at December stats and it still seems about the same. 43% firefox/43% IE (just barely with FF winning), then safari, opera, and others.

On the OS front, 80% are still using windows, 16% on mac, and the rest being linux variants.

Thanks for the info! I imagine you'd get tired of it pretty quickly if I polled you for this on a monthly basis, though.

Out of curiosity, why no access logs?
posted by Spike at 8:22 PM on December 24, 2006

On a large site, retaining access logs quickly adds up to gigabytes and gigabytes of space unless you automatically rotate and compress them, or otherwise limit them to some small time frame. I have known more than a few people that just disable logging because they woke up one day with their site down because there was no free space on their partition because their rotation cron job failed in some way. And besides, since GA is already taking care of gathering stats then retaining log files is just pointless busywork and a waste of storage (not to mention making his life much easier should a law enforcement agency ever ask.)
posted by Rhomboid at 9:01 PM on December 24, 2006

And if you don't keep access logs, you can't be made to surrender them to some misbegotten authority under some misbegotten law which also constrains you from telling anyone about it under penalty of jail time.
posted by George_Spiggott at 9:38 PM on December 24, 2006

I have known more than a few people that just disable logging because they woke up one day with their site down because there was no free space on their partition because their rotation cron job failed in some way.

Nobody who knows what they're doing writes logs to the same physical volume as the storage required for the critical application.
posted by George_Spiggott at 9:42 PM on December 24, 2006