Hacker News Reader

Comment by nfoz | Hacker News Reader

Can everyone please just stop using google analytics

Webserver logs give you all the information you should want about how users look at your page, and don't violate your users' privacy by notifying a third-party advertising company about their browsing habits.

View on HN

I don't think github gives users access to the logs. Also, Google Analytics provides a more convenient way of looking through the data, more information, and alerts. It also lets you view the data for multiple sites at once.

Github could provide their users access to those logs.

And if convenient log analyzers do not exist in 2014, that sounds like a great project to put on.... Github.

I've heard good things about self-hosted, open source Piwik: http://piwik.org/

Google Analytics and the rest do more than just log web traffic details. They also offer event tracking and real-time stats, with a decent UI, so that your marketing director or boss can easily jump in and check things out.

I realize there are similar offerings that don't require a third party but I don't see them as equal alternatives.

Server logs display requests that reach the server. This has the potential to become problematic if you have an intermediary proxy of some sort (CDN, cache, SaaS based proxy) which you may or may not get access logs from. GA, or any java-script based snippet, has the potential to be more accurate in that sense.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com