» We're
entering a new world in which data may be more important than software. Tim
O'Reilly
» You
can have data without information, but you cannot have information
without data. Daniel
Keys Moran
» Errors
using inadequate data are much less than those using no data at all. Charles
Babbage
Welcome to StatPress
Community, the Real Time Statistics for your web.
We appreciate the chance for testing and using this plugin. In case you
need
it , there will be more help
on the WordpressReady site
and their forums.
Current Version: V1.6.90 (2012-05-20 9:40 -3GT)
Changes/Improvement introduced:
Changes/Features/Improvement
|
What is in it for you?
|
- Recording error pages (ex: 404 errors)
|
- Now you can see directly in the main view any incorrect access to the site, because a broken link or other reason.
|
- Render time in the footer
|
- Now there is time indicator in the footer with the time needed to
render the overview page. Useful to see if the plugin is becoming slow.
|
| - The
instant spy tool is including Google Maps feature. The tooltip
hovering was adjusted so you can also navigate inside the map(!)
|
- Beyond Statcomm: action statcomm_info added
| - This feature allows you to interact with the plugin, extending it with your ideas. Some examples will be included in the blog and forum shortly
|
Fixes:
- Minor problem with Last Spiders icons
| - Some icons where disabled , they are back.
|
Introduction
For sake of simplification we will use the StatComm
abbreviation to refer
StatPress Community (the current version).
Also we'll often use de term UAS
db for User
Agent String database.
- What is
StatPress Community?
- How does it works?
- StatComm Main Features:
- Graphics
view: Visual Traffic View
- Details
- Spy
feature: who's there?
- Global Search
- Export Feature
- Control
& Filter &Customize Data View:
Options
- Collecting/ignoring logged users
- Collecting /ignoring spiders
- Set time frame for cutting analytic data (for all data
or only spiders)
- Setting graphics options
- Setting minimunn role access to operate
- Unknown User
Agents
- StatComm
Advanced Features
- Ban Ip
- Browser Detection
- Os detection
- Search Engines
- Spiders
- Multilanguaje
features. and considerations
- Widgets
- Services
used by StatComm
- FAQ
- Credits
1. What
is
StatPress Comunity?
StatComm
plugin shows the site traffic providing a real time
graphics from many different sources, collecting information
about
visitors,
spiders, search keywords, feeds, browsers, OS (Operative System)
and more.
2. How
does it
works?
StatComm
relies on Wordpress capabilities to do the task. Wordpress include
hooks to get the information about the traffic, but this
information is
raw, without distinction of procedence or destination.
StatComm
is capable of filtering this data, extract the relevant
information and present it in a readable visual
format. It combines the raw information with different databases getting an accurate view of incoming visitors.
3. StatComm Main Features
StatComm
provides a set of features for visualizing real time traffic, including
graphics bar, country flags and many other indicators.
-
Graphics
view: Visual Traffic View
The Visual Traffic View can be accessed clicking the
StatPress main
In a single view, you will appreciate the current day traffic,
categorized by Visitors, PageViews, Spiders and Feeds. Over the graphic
bar, you will have a briefing about today's traffic,
yesterday's traffic and several calculations and consolidated data.
Tip:
hover the mouse on each graphic bar to see specific values of
visitors, pageviews ,spiders and feeds.
Tip 2:
hover the mouse over the IP to spy information about current user. See
Instant Spy
Above the graphics you have several reports on the current traffic:
- Last hits:
Report about the 20 last visitors, including time, page they
went, OS, and browser.
- New in v1.6.90: StatComm is able to track error pages and other errors, highlighting the rows.
New on
StatComm 1.6.3:
- OS, Browser/Engines and spider icons added
- Hovering on links provides more information
- Links on Pages, OS and Browser/Engines
- Browser/Engine version (when is possible)
-
Hovering the links
will show complete link information
New
on StatComm 1.6.60:
- When
GeoLocation enabled, the Last Hits provide more info about country
(hover flag to see the country name), the region and the city.
- Important:
columns Flag, Region & City only visible if you download and
enabled the Maxmind database. See Plugin Options
- Last search
terms:
shows what were the last terms that users were
looking for before reach your site. Very useful for SEO purposes.
(Improved on StatComm 1.6.3, with icons, links, hovering information
and more)
- Improved Last Search in 1.6.4
- Last referrers:
shows where are the incoming users going. (improved on StatComm 1.6.3)
- Last agents:
show what were the last agents (browsers or different programs
navigating on your site) who reached the site.(Improved on StatComm
1.6.3, with icons, links, hovering information and more)
- Last pages:
show the last pages visited for the visitors (Improved on StatComm
1.6.3, with icons, links, hovering information and more)
- Last spiders:
show the last spider (search engines) which visited the site. (Improved
on StatComm 1.6.3, with icons, links, hovering information and more)
In the
bottom of the page there is also some valuable information to be
noted:
- Current table size/number of records: Give an idea about
records stored.
- Current time
- Ohter details: RSS2, ATOM, RSS, and RSS2 and ATOM comments
2. Details
The
Details menu
provides a different statistical view of the data stored. This
view summarizes the information based on all current records
to display trending information and
categorizes in different areas, as Top 5 days, OS, Browser, Feeds
Totals, Search Engines, Top Search Items, Countries, Spiders, etc.
3. Spy
feature: who's there?
The Spy feature is used to understand and follow the single
activity of particular users, allowing track down the pages visited,
time, procedence and IP.
This view will group the user activity by ip giving
an overview of his/her current navigation trends on the site.
3.1 Instant Spy Tool: Who are you?
From Statcomm 1.6.70 Statcomm provides an extra tool to provide instant
insight information from the current traffic. Since version 1.6.90 it
also includes Google Maps to provide a view from latitude/longitude.
This
tool provides an easy way to see an user activity just hovering the
mouse over the IP. A tooltip will appear providing all information
relative to the current record selected.
The following information is provided:
- Record Id Number
- Nation Flag, Country Name, Continent, City and Region
- Latitude/Longitude
- Browser and Operative System (if applies) . If it is a
RSS reader will provide the best info possible.
- Pages visited by user . You can specify how many
days go back to inspect and also how many max. records to retrieve
(configurable from the Options Panel)
- Searched text if apply.
- New in v1.6.90: browseable Google Maps.
4. Global
Search
The Global Search allows find information from the data
tables.The search will include all the records currently
stored to retrieve results.
5. Export
Feature
The export data allows saving your traffic data to text or CSV
files
for further analysis. You can even import this information to other
tables for further analysis. Currently it supports date ranges.
6.
Control
& Filter
&Customize data view:
Options
The Options Panel allows to
change different settings and even alter the normal plugin behavior to
your convenience.
After new improvements in version 1.6.40 with using the Settings API
provided for Wordpress, version 1.6.50 continues with the expansion
adding features for automatic data updates.
v1.6.60 added Maxmind Gelocation service.
The component
checking panel
The upper panel provides the following information:
- Checking if
ZipArchive class is available:
when
it's time to download the User Agent String data, this info comes
zipped. StatComm uses ZipArchive to unpackage the data. If this
component isn't present, the plugin will be unable of unpackaging the
data.
- What if this class isn't available in your system? The
only drawback will be that you cannot be capable of getting any
updates. In this case we recommend find a way of installing
this
class on the host or disable the download service.
- Checking if
folder def is writable:
StatComm needs this folder be writeable in order to
download updates.
- What
if your def folder is non writeable?: You won't get any UAS db updates.
You can continue working with the current local UAS database.
- I want to make def folder read-only: please
disable the download service to avoid getting any updates.
- Current User
Agent String DB Download Service is (Enabled/Disabled):
indicates if the service is running, you can change it with the options
below.
- Current User
Agent String DB Version: every UAS db has its own version
coded YYYYMMDD-XX (year-month-day-version number) . It will say also
when it was downloaded.
- StatComm will
update User Agent String DB in: countdown to show when is
the next check
Here you will see the most common options:
- Also collect
data
about logged users: By default, StatComm does not
collect traffic generated by logged users. If this option is enabled,
all activity
would be logged (even admin activity). This option is useful when the
site has specific purpose (like for example, a community with
membership)
- Do not
collect spiders visits: The spiders are automatic programs
browsing your site to collect data
for indexing. They are
not users, but they act like one. Unless exceptional cases, the data
collected from the spiders activity
tends
to be big and useless. This option disable spiders
recording and saves an important space in the records table.
- Automatically
delete visits older than...: StatComm captures
visitor information until eventually the maximum database
capacity or hardware capacity, which ever runs out first. The excesive
amount of data would cause a performance loss on the plugin, specially
evident when summarizing data to display graphic statistics. Depending
on your traffic, it would be wise to clear the data records
from time to time. The available options are (Never delete (which
is default), 1,3,6 or 12 months).
- Automatically
delete spiders visits
older than:
For the reasons above mentioned, the traffic
generated by spiders are normally not worth it. It is possible to
schedule its deletion to keep the records clean , so the plugin will
perform faster. Options are 1 day, 1 week, 1 month or 1 year. It would
be clever to activate this option for deleting undesired data stored
and
keep user information.
- Days in
Overview graph: You can change the amount of columns in
the Overview Graphic Bar from here. Options are 7, 10, 20, 30 and 50
days.
- Minimum
Capability to view stats: Usually the
statistics are allowed only for admin users, but in case you need to
allow
view statistics to user with less privileges, you can change this
feature to an appropiate level. Fixed
in v1.6.5: the user only can set privileges from its user
level and above.
- User Agent String
Database: This automattic settings detect if there is a new UAS database available and it will allow you to update if you want.
- Check to
enable User-Agent-String Db download service:
This settings allows disable the service if you are absolutely freak
about security concern. Note that if you disable the service, the
plugin will continue running normally with the current database. You
will need to be sure that the ini files are in place (see StatComm advanced
features)
- Check to
enable Maxmind Geolocation service: this
new characteristics will enable to get see more information about
incoming users, like country, region and city and also another
information. This featyure will be used in following versions to expand
the plugin. CAUTION: to enable this feature, you would need to download
the Maxmind database. Please follow the link to download the databse.
The download is auttomatic and it should be smooth.
- How many days
to spy back: it is possible to set how many days (from
today) to inspect back and find possible previous visit from current
visitor. You can go as far as one year. We recommend to set no more
than 1 month.(more time means more time to get the calculation done).
- How many days
in the spy list: You can control how many result to
display in Spy tool (Instant Spy and also Spy tool page) from 5
(default) to 20 results.
7. Unknown
User Agents
StatComm attempt
to understand the incoming traffic and separate users from spiders.
This decision is based on identifiers provided by the browser signatuer
(User Agent String). When it
fails to recognize it, the Agent is listed on this Category. Due the
changing nature of Internet and browsers, the Agent string is always
growing, requiring that
StatComm
update its internal Agent database
from time to time.
4.
StatComm
Advanced Features
Although
StatComm
provides a great deal of information, it has many other features which
improves its functionality.
Since
StatComm 1.6.3, all information about spiders, user agents (spiders and
browsers) and operative systems is handled using a new API
(see
FAQ in this document
for more information)
Some of these characteristics will be
expanded for easier maintenance. Perhaps one of the most interesting
and not-so-known features are their
custom definition table
(.dat tables) and also their user agent data (
.ini tables) to
store . All those definition
tables are stored on the plugin location, under the
def folder,
and those tables play a key rol on
StatComm
configuration.
- Ban IP feature: the banips.dat file
keeps a
list of ip to be rejected. When a user try to get your blog through any
IP listed on this table definition, it will automatically banned (the
plugin does not track activity for this ip).
- New in StatComm 1.6.3: the plugin uses a new engine to keep
track of incoming users/spiders, relying on three different files:
- uasdata.ini:
Contains all information about browsers, operative systems and
spiders.
- cache.ini:
temporal file used by the engine to mark version and when check for
updates.
- searchterm.ini:
track search engines and extract searched terms from the referrer.
- Files browser.dat,os.dat,searchengines.dat
and spider.dat becomes obsolete from StatComm 1.6.3. If
you install this plugin manually, you can safely remove it.
- Since 1.6.50 we remade the plugin to get updates from
the User
Agent String database (UAS DB) using a more
reliable service.
- Since version 1.6.60 the plugin uses the Maxmind geolocation database
to provide enhanced information from the incoming traffic.
5.
Language features and considerations
StatComm
support currently many languages including English, Italian,
Spanish, French, German, Russian, Norwegian, Dutch, Brazilian
(Portugues), Turkish and Swedish. More languages will be supported
in the newer versions.
The language will switch automatically depending on the Wordpress
WPLANG value.
This can be defined on the
wp-config.php
Wordpress file.
Example:
define('WPLANG',
'es_ES'); //switching Wordpress to Spanish, will automatically set
StatComm to Spanish.
6. Widgets
Top Posts Widget
Print widget
StatComm offers two
widgets to show relevant information about your traffic stats.
The TopPosts
widgets shows the most viewed pages on your site, while the StatComm Custom View widget
allows you to present the data in multiple ways depending on your
choice.
In version 1.6.2 both widget were updated. The Topposts
widget will be
also improved in the on the incoming versions.
7.
Services
used by StatComm
Statcomm
relies on Internet services to keep it running. In normal circunstances
you won't even know that, but is good to know what services
are
used with StatComm to give them the credit they deserves:
hostip API
: provides geolocalization and also flags icons. Note: since v1.6.70 this feature is provided by Maxmind database. - Project
Honeypot: this service for spam analysis is used in the Unknown User Agents
menu to validate and inspect potential dangerous ip.
- User Agent String info:
this site provides an API to access to the information about
user
agents around the Internet, with a database frequently updated. StatComm
includes a class to handle the complexity of retrieving
information and automatically download the user agent database. Update:
1.6.4 currently has user agent database running but the download is
disabled. We detect that potential users could be banned from getting
database from the original site so, what it was solved in version 1.6.5
- User
Agent String Database Repository (UAS db Repository):
since v1.6.5 StatComm
updates the UAS using a custom service in more
stable way. The updates runs automatically . We recommend updates every
2 weeks, this can be changed from the settings from 1 week or
to a month, since the info
is not critical.
- Maxmind
Geolocation database: Since
version 1.6.60 is possible to use geolocation. Go to Options download
the geolocation database and activate using the checkbox. The plugin
automatically checks if the database is available to provide additional
information in the reports.
8. FAQ
- Is there any special
considerations about installation?
- Since version 1.6.3, StatComm
uses a new API to retrieve information about user agents. Therefore, it
will need the def folder
under the plugin installation folder to be writable (777) in
order to download the user agent database and perform updates to the
cache.
- After that the user agent database requires no manual
maintenance. It is handled automatically.
- Since version 1.6.5 you can control the service, setting
the refresh update and also enabling/disabling the service. The
settings were
introduced if you want to tighten your WP installation and you want to
leave def folder read only and stop refreshing UAS db.
- Does
Statcomm needs to communicate to another services?
- The plugin becomes slow
when I have so much data!
- Although
this version is not focused to performance yet, there are few
improvements you can do to make the plugin works quite fine :
- Check the footer on overview
page. You will see the table size and how many records you are
currently handling. We recommend for the current version to stay
below 100.000 records. Future version are targetted for
performance so stay tuned.
- Drop information you consider useless.
Usually spider information tend to be as high as 60% (or more)
of the total information stored. If you desire to delete spiders
information, there is an option to Not collect spiders
visits. You can also delete older information about
spiders, there is also an option to do that. Set to an appropiate value.
- If your traffic is high (above 5000
daily) You can also want to delete older visits
- What is the User Agent
String Database?
- The User Agent String Database (UAS DB)
is group of .ini files who provides detailed information
about
browsers, spiders, and operative systems from your traffic. This
database is provided by sites like User-Agent-String.info
. This plugin provides a way to handle this information and download
updates.
- Why using UAS
db against using older .dat files?: the
.dat files is a hardcoded format with no updates. Therefore, most
current version of Statpress and previous version of StatComm relies in
data which is becoming quickly obsolete. The UAS db provides a
straightforward solution to stay updated and get the most accurate
information from your traffic.
- Where is the
Maxmind database stored? It is stored in the def folder, with the name GeoLiteCity.dat.
- I can't
download the database from Maxmind:
With slow connections, the database could be difficult to download.
Also, if you try to download it many times in a short period,
your ip could be banned from some time. Try later. In any case
you
can download the database, decompress it and put it on the plugin def folder.
The plugin will detect the file and you can proceed normally.
- Something isn't working
in the way it should!
- I have a suggestion to
make!
- Great! Please use the links above to contact us.
9.
Credits
StatComm
is a complete and much improved rewrite of StatPress, another
stats plugin. It will
provide on the following versions a truly way to update from many
unsupported or outdated StatPress plugins variations. A detailed
milestone is under way in the
main site.
StatComm is
currently under development, providing support and appreciating the
feedback from its starting community.
This project is based on the develop of thousands of
contributors along the web
& time. Without them, this work would be unfeasible.
The
StatComm
Project will bring to the present those efforts,
project it to the future and build the best and most advanced stats
plugin conceivable.
"The best software is not
about brilliant coding. It's about careful listening".
