Replace Google Analytics with non-tracking homemade system

alakajam-team / alakajam

Website powering the Alakajam! game making community

https://alakajam.com/

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Replace Google Analytics with non-tracking homemade system #465

Open mkalam-alami opened 5 years ago

mkalam-alami commented 5 years ago

Apparently it's impossible to completely disable cookies on Google Analytics, even disabling all tracking options makes it not totally GDPR compliant.

Homemade tool:

Each request increments a counter linked to a specific page and date (table: page_views with columns: date, path, counter - the first one at least would be indexed)
Have an administration page let us query results by date ranges, possibly by partial path.
Bonus: save changes in batches instead of 1 DB query per request.

If we want someday to have a GDPR-compliant concept of visitor without tracking cookies we can look into https://usefathom.com/news/anonymization

ttencate commented 5 years ago

If all we're after is tracking page visit counts, that's a fine solution. If we need client-side data for whatever reason, maybe some self-hosted analytics tool like Piwik could be an option.

mkalam-alami commented 3 years ago

Possible alternative: https://github.com/plausible/analytics / https://plausible.io/docs/self-hosting (Docker required)

ttencate commented 3 years ago

I recently started using GoatCounter for my site. Easy to self-host (uses SQLite or PostgreSQL) and it works great.

On Sat, Jan 16, 2021, 00:51 Marwane Kalam-Alami notifications@github.com wrote:

Possible alternative: https://plausible.io/

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mkalam-alami commented 3 years ago

Thanks, I've tried the SaaS version and it seems perfect. I suspect self-hosting it will work better against ad blockers (uBlock origin blocked my tests so I had to disable it on alakajam.com).

I also like that we can make the stats public https://alakajam.goatcounter.com/ :)