ihucos

<3

I would say comparing GoAccess and counter.dev is a little bit like comparing apples and oranges. GoAccess analyses log files, that is a more robust approach I would say. I wonder how GoAccess can know unique Unique Visitors, guess that is directly mapped to the IP address which should be fairly accurate. An advantage with GoAccess as a website owner is that you can see traffic coming in from users using things like uBlock origin which is pretty widespread actually.

With counter.dev you have some metrics that you do not have with GoAccess like for example device type, the country of the users and some other minor things. But the biggest advantage is that it is easier to integrate. There are a lot of people with something like a Wordpress site for their restaurant that email me asking how to add counter.dev's tracking script into their site. Many people don't have access to their log files and I think it would be impractical for them to literally compile their analytics tool.

So if you are happy with GoAccess and have it set up you don't need to change.

But if you want to try counter.dev you get your tracking script after just registering with a username and a password. Then put the tracking script in your site and that's it.

Yes, but not very soon. So the thing is that counter.dev is optimised to handle many users for free. For example as the primary database Redis is used. But if you are actually paying for the server resources SQL is just fine. The service is optimised for efficiency and my concern would be that having some kind of "white label" self hosting one click solution would bring in too much complexity that would go against the aim of saving server resources in order to offer the service for free. Maybe I am wrong, but that is my current thinking.

That being said you can technically self host and I am happy to answer questions at hey@counter.dev . Is just that this solution is not designed to be self hosted and with another web analytics solution the self hosting experience could be more streamlined.

One thing that for me would actually make sense is having a conventional backend that plug and plays with the awesome counter.dev UI - then the "only" codebase change would be to whitelabel the UI. But yeah, that might not happen anytime soon.

I am maintaining counter.dev - If you have any questions, don't hesitate to ask :-)

counter.dev does not use any id at all for tracking.

Posted and issue to fix it: https://github.com/AdguardTeam/AdGuardSDNSFilter/issues/1260

All planned :-)

Also a very interesting approach. The difference to counter.dev is that counter.dev does not need any hashes or any unique ids at all, which saves complexity and avoids needing to explain why our specific way of using hashes or ids is privacy friendly. As we have none.

Yes, I would like to do it. But to be quite honest there are other priorities on top of that. Of course we're happy to accept pull requests though!

Hello worksonmine,

please see on my upper response a more technical elaboration on how it works. It is not the same as cookies.

Cheers

Hello I am the counter.dev maintainer.

No! To see the complete tracking script in all glory check it out here: https://github.com/ihucos/counter.dev/blob/master/docs/scrip...

The relevant part is here:

13| sessionStorage.setItem("_swa", "1");

With that the script marked that the visit was tracked and no further http requests to track the unique view are send.

You are welcome, internet stranger

I feel similar. I thought I could navigate the darker parts of the web and viewed myself as a native. Now I am also overwhelmed. I don't want something that revulationary.

Terminator Movie! Am I the only one?

Can we stop this programming language bashing.

That is nice. I am writing my own docker with blackjack and … https://github.com/ihucos/plash

Ha I can make advertising for my own analytics platform: https://counter.dev

Its google analytics without google and prettier

I like it. There is always a way to hack something. This is an additional layer of security that yes, can be also broken.

Thanks for mentioning, glad to see counter popping up organically ;-) I'd say what differs us from others is aiming at providing user value for free by aggressively optimizing hosting costs. But you don't need to care about that, it looks great and works and is free. For way over a year now. Cheers

There is also counter.dev - Free and Privacy friendly since more than a year now.

Our approach is to be free and sustainable by radically cutting down hosting costs. Most technical solutions are mentioned in the Github page. Apart from this honestly the product is well polished and easy to use. Check it out :-)

TLDW. But I have counter.dev running with redis as the primary database. It just works. Of course you need consider carefully. One of the advantages I saw is that every query on the database has a documented complexity. I don't need to hope for the database to run the query fast enough. It's more transparent.

For every user you'd have to know all usernames which could be brute forced guessed or gathered with some sort of crawler.

It's definitely a great point you bring up I think with web analytics an attacker has a natural advantage since captchas would obviously not be feasable. But it is worth to but effort in not making it too easy.

> Happy lunch!

Thanks :-) gonna start with my normal job now^^

Well, I do have Dos protection so you'r traffic would get rejected at some point in time but it would make me unhappy because I'll have to fix up the data for demo or restore the backup for it. You'll have to do a little better than just that but generally speaking I can't 100% secure myself about the demo data being skewed. Other analytics may have a better position here because they do track and mess with the requester's IP address but I don't. [Writing in my lunch time]

> I will definitely keep an eye on Counter.dev as an alternative to that, good luck!

Thanks! If you need something, write us an mail.

Well, people that know me know that I am not arrogant but actually I'd like to counter (pun intended) that offer. My Co-Founder and me want to work one year full time on the project. Here is our mail: hey@counter.dev

Free version. Not sure the server would survive Hacker News without it.

:-)

Oh by the way, we are looking for a Co-Founder that we are convinced is able to grow counter. We really don't care how, chould be content marketing. We are here for the long term. Write a couple of sentences to hey@counter.dev

Yes, also before the HN peak it seemed that windows was not so common actually. Which kind of makes sense given the product.