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Re: Webalizer's Handlign of Feeds

__/ [Mark Goodge] on Thursday 05 January 2006 07:35 \__

> On Thu, 05 Jan 2006 05:50:44 +0000, Roy Schestowitz put finger to
> keyboard and typed:
> 
>>I sometimes use a fairly recent version of Webalizer (now that I check, it
>>*is* the most recent version) to analyse logs. I suspect that visit counts
>>in Webalizer differ widely from the figures reported by AWStats due to
>>handling of requests for feeds. Has anybody noticed the same behaviour?
>>It's as though the definition of a "visit", let alone detection of
>>crawlers, makes the term very subjective.
> 
> The definition of a "visit" *is very subjective. Different stats
> packages use different algorithms to caclulate the figure, and they
> all come up with different answers.
> 
>> What is it that people consider a visit if
>>one tool reports numbers twice as big as the other's.
> 
> I would say that a single visit is one person viewing my site. But
> what if the same person views a couple of pages three hours apart - is
> that two visits, or one? What about three minutes apart - two visits,
> or one? What about caches and proxy servers - how do I distinguish
> different users of these? If a person is viewing my site at 23:59 and
> still there at 00:01, is that a single visit spanning two days or two
> different visits? If it's a single visit, how do I allocate it in the
> daily stats?
> 
> All of these are subjective, and some of them will have different
> answers depending on the nature of the site. Only you can make that
> call for your own site, and configure your stats packages
> appropriately. Using the out-of-the-box default settings simply means
> you're deferring to the opinion of the software's creator, who doesn't
> necessarily share your opinions and certainly knows nothing about your
> website.
> 
> Mark

Thanks, Mark. Your answer has been very helpful. I guess that bandwidth/hits
remain the less subjective measure, especially if they contain crawlers
traffic (bad idea) and assume no cache or proxies. In other words, many
statistics can be nothing more than a rough approximation, yet not utter
rubbish. As time goes by, I spend less and less time looking at stats. I
sometimes wonder if others lose interest too. Maybe it is somehow associated
with the nature of this mundane routine which makes 'cravings' for it go
away.

Roy

-- 
Roy S. Schestowitz      |    "All your archives are (sic) belong to Google"
http://Schestowitz.com  |    SuSE Linux     |     PGP-Key: 0x74572E8E
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