Introducing GitHub Traffic Analytics | Hacker News Reader

Introducing GitHub Traffic Analytics

github.com

101 pointsxPaw18 comments

Well that makes https://github.com/igrigorik/ga-beacon somewhat redundant

Wohoo! https://twitter.com/jnunemaker/status/420634885552754688 :)

Figures, I just found out about ga-beacon yesterday. This saved me a good bit of effort!

Oh thank you thank you thank you! This disappeared when they introduced the new graphs, and I've been missing them ever since. This time we can even see uniques, which is awesome.

Bitdeli (https://bitdeli.com/) is another free service that provides analytics for Github pages. I have been using it but didn't like the association with AdRoll, a targeted advertising company.

Just to clarify: GitHub Analytics at https://bitdeli.com has been a fun side project of mine and jtuulos - it has nothing to do with AdRoll.

Shameless plug: my site, Sourcegraph, gives you a 1990s-style numeric visit counter for your READMEs, among other things.

https://sourcegraph.com/help/authors/badges

While GitHub Traffic Analytics shows the repository author much more info, the Sourcegraph counter makes the visitor count visible to everybody. This helps users see how popular your project is.

Notably, Google Analytics and the ga-beacon can be blocked by disabling JavaScript or blocking the beacon's domain. How can privacy-conscious users avoid being tracked by this feature?

e: I've just looked at my own pages' analytics and was quite surprised to find data from before today. Is this to say that GitHub has been surrepticiously recording data about my project without any way to opt out?

From my understanding all Github features are deployed to staff only behind a feature flag. Naturally they had it partially in production before flipping the flag for everybody

That said, surely the notion of a website where you are hosting content tracking who is visiting individual pages is not outrageous.

c.f. your web host inspecting your access logs. My project is my own and your platform is yours. That said, my primary concern is that I as a user have no way to opt out.

Excellent! IIRC there used to be a "traffic" chart, no? I don't remember it doing anything, though.

EDIT: According to my Timehop they also released the "contributions" graph a year ago (the little grid on your profile) - great feature :)

So that Google Analytics for GitHub project is already obsolete?

Not if you want to aggregate your stats in your Google Analytics Dashboard.

You can still export the data from GitHub Analytics into Google Analytics. That'd give you more info then what you get from a bad image hack.

Does this provide traffic details for GitHub Pages associated with the repo?

Nope. You're free to use whatever you want on your own pages (Google Analytics, Gauges, etc).

About time. Thanks Github :)

this is great

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