Client detection

[sgiehl]

Currently Piwik is only able to detect browsers. Instead of detecting only browsers we should open up piwik to client based detection. Clients can be browsers, as well as media players, mobile apps, personal information managers (like mail clients), feed readers and so on. The DeviceDetector used by Piwik is already able to detect such clients. As it is impossible to define short codes for all those possible clients, we might need to move away from only saving short codes (like it is actually done for browsers)

With client based detection there will be more reports possible within Piwik. So it would be nice to see which client types mostly visits a website and os on.

[ThaDafinser]

@sgiehl i would go further...save all client $_SERVER vars serialized in one field inside piwik_log_visit. Pro:

• at an upgrade you can extract them, if other table fields need to be field
• you can update the short codes or other things at an upgrade

Con:

• possible overflow (TEXT can be too small....i had it one time as LARGETEXT....)
• needs a lot of space

[mattab]

Hi @sgiehl - great idea of a new report for Piwik.

Do you maybe have some idea on approx estimate for this issue?

[sgiehl]

I think that would take a few days for implementation. We need to built a switch between the different client types and therefor adjust the table structure as we need additional information. Currently all client types other than browser will be reported as "unknown" browser, which will then be excluded from the browser reports. Maybe I can provide a detailed list of todos as soon as I have some time for that.

I would love to see that in the near future!

[bigretromike]

is near feature now 👍 ?

[bigretromike]

Hello, is there way to help with this ? Maybe sort all ShortCodes for all type of devices ?

[sgiehl]

that might require various database changes to be able to store other client types than browsers. Guess such a change won't be doable before the next major release.

[bigretromike]

Why not store big table of shortcodes for every type? Or add column with single integer as a type and depend who detects useragent that type and short code would be saved, while everything before would be default browser int ID example 1. That would make the issue simpler. I crossfingers that this wont take next 5years, sadly I never touched php framework big project like this so Im unable to hop and coded that but I do have some knowlegth so the proposal is not out of the world

On May 7, 2019 3:13:36 PM GMT+02:00, Stefan Giehl notifications@github.com wrote:

that might require various database changes to be able to store other client types than browsers. Guess such a change won't be doable before the next major release.

-- You are receiving this because you commented. Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub: https://github.com/matomo-org/matomo/issues/5413#issuecomment-490073728

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[bigretromike]

Looking thru gh I found: https://github.com/matomo-org/matomo/pull/13929 looks like you started moving from codes to names. So could I assume the future is closer than it was year ago ?:-)

[mattab]

Would it work to simply use different shortcodes for the new clients we want to detect?

[bigretromike]

@mattab I does exactly that! But I understand that the issue was that Matomo store '2 char value' and that would go out of stock if used that way for every client. But as I remember moving from shortcodes to names was one of requirements to add a custom client detection without needing to edit manually detection library to detect other kinds of devices that are not browsers but yet are able to access pages and are excludes from browser raport (ex. media players)

[sgiehl]

exactly. device detector is for example able to detect names of mobile apps. that can't be be combined with short codes in any way

[bigretromike]

that why you need currently overwrite detect library to include those in browser and exclude them from ex. mobile apps - then you are able to measure real traffic and how does it come to you. And I have fingers cross that we be able to add our 'browsers' or change some settings to include those 'apps/applications/programs' that access our content thru web