Stats Accuracy Question

Which is accurate for a site, AWSTATS or MODx?

They both seem to display differant information and totals???

Also, has anyone ever used Mint?

I tend towards champagne taste on a tapwater budget, but that Mint does look really nice; well worth the price. And their demo movie shows they are Mac users!

I’m not fond of the way MODx handles its logging; especially the browser logging. I’m looking at a few different way of dealing with that, and including locale information (use a service like http://www.hostip.info/use.html or my own database http://software77.net/cgi-bin/ip-country/geo-ip.pl?) as well as making some pretty graphs and charts. My ultimate goal is to have a choice of maps, from country to region to world, showing the distribution of visitors geographically.

Maybe user logging could be pulled out of the core and made a plugin? Like a WYSIWYG editor, not everybody uses it, and I think as time goes on there will be more and more users that have their own ideas on the subject.

I agree Mint looks NICE!

Still, same question:

Which is accurate for a site, AWSTATS or MODx?

They both seem to display differant information and totals???

Caveat: what I’m about to say is purely half-baked conjecture based on my limited understanding and having spent all of under 60 minutes total in thinking about this, so take it for what it’s worth.

The stats in MODx aren’t remotely what they could be. This is an area that has not been redone one iota. The stats in MODx also don’t track non-MODx-native resources. This very forum hung off the back of our MODx site, is a perfect example. It’ll register the weblink clicks, but that’s it. No tracking of the

Now MODx’s Friendly URLs and not-found/404 handling also pose an interesting problem. My understanding is that with SEF URLs turned on, 404 pages never make it to the Apache logs, so you don’t really get a "true" picture of what’s going on with your site. So this somewhat diminishes the accuracy of "real" stat-tracking program like AWSTATs (which I prefer).

And Shaun Inmann’s Mint is just plain cool. In fact Raymond and I discussed integrating it’s open source predecessor (ShortStat) into MODx. It’s pretty cool and smart in the way it handles things and keeps a rolling database no bigger than 20MB or so.

Any ideas on how to address the magic combo of SEF URLs and AWSTATs with proper 404 error logging via Apache’s logs?

I don’t have any great ideas about how to handle stats but if we’re going to redo the stats I’d like to see it done as a module/plugins.

I think most people have their own stats program that they like to use. Plus the way that the stats work they are horrible for any large site that gets a lot of hits. We had to turn statistics off since our log tables were getting so bloated they were crippling the whole site.

Hmmm.... mint relies on JS for tracking to bypass referer spam and search spiders. Also omits Feed Readers. Maybe not so cool after all.

Dang.

I missed.

I should have put this post here instead of in the other stats discussion. Oh well. Live and learn.