Thanks very much for this workaround. We just made the change to GA you describe, and our statistics appear normal again. Thanks!
Philip On Fri, Oct 4, 2019 at 1:17 PM Bryson Duda <bryson.d...@gmail.com> wrote: > We're still experiencing the same issue as well with Dspace 6.3 and XMLUI. > The workaround that I've been using so far is to create a custom segment in > Google Analytics to remove any traffic where the Landing Page is "(not > set)". That seems to bring the traffic down to where we would expect it to > be prior to the upgrade. I've attached an image of the filter in case it's > helpful for anyone. > > I've been digging into this recently, and I think that I might know what's > behind it. I believe that Dspace 6 was the first version to include Event > tracking in Google Analytics (Neha Singh, I think that this might help > answer your question above as well). The idea is that every time a document > is downloaded, an event is recorded in GA. If I look under Behavior -> > Events -> Top Events, it shows a massive amount of download events (61 000 > for Sept. 2019 alone), all of which have Homepage = (not set). I originally > wondered if this was a bug with the way that Dspace registers events, but > when I checked the Dspace Tomcat logs, I discovered that it does appear to > be actual download traffic. > > To test this, I picked one document which had 1847 download events listed > in Analytics over two days in September, and found an almost identical > number of bitstream downloads in the logs for those two days. The downloads > came from 610 unique IPs, and there were no other downloads in September > after the two day flurry. Geographically, 46% of the download events for > that item came from Ashburn, Virginia (which apparently suggests that it > likely came from an Amazon data center: > https://www.statusbureau.com/analytics-bot-traffic-ashburn/), and the > rest were fairly evenly spread throughout the rest of the world. 90% of the > download event traffic was direct (not referral, social, or search). > Interestingly, the item I chose isn't even a recent upload, it was added to > our repository in 2015. > > From all of this, my best guess is that the extra traffic is due to direct > downloads from bots archiving academic content on the web. The workaround I > mentioned above works fine to remove all of the download event traffic from > your Google Analytics results, but it would certainly be preferable to only > filter out that bot traffic and leave only the download events triggered by > real people. I did double-check and the option to exclude hits from bots is > already turned on for this view. I suppose for now the best option is to > filter out traffic from Ashburn as the article above suggests. If anyone > comes across a better solution, I would love to hear it! > > Bryson > > > On Tuesday, October 1, 2019 at 7:40:51 PM UTC-6, Bhavesh Patel wrote: >> >> Yes, the same issue faced by us also in DSpace 6 version. >> >> Bhavesh >> >> On Wed, 2 Oct 2019, 12:36 am Anne Lawrence, <al...@vt.edu> wrote: >> >>> We are using XMLUI. >>> >>> On Tuesday, October 1, 2019 at 2:58:43 PM UTC-4, Anne Lawrence wrote: >>>> >>>> We just migrated from DSpace 5.8 to DSpace 6.3 on September 11 and have >>>> noticed the same huge spike in sessions since then. >>>> >>>> Comparing August 16-25, 2019 to September 16-25, 2019: >>>> >>>> Sessions: 12,000 vs 197,000 >>>> New visitors: 9,000 vs 162,000 >>>> >>>> Source / Medium Sessions >>>> google / organic 4,949 >>>> (direct) / (none) 2,791 >>>> scholar.google.com / referral 1,670 >>>> search.vt.edu / referral 297 >>>> >>>> vs >>>> >>>> Source / Medium Sessions >>>> (direct) / (none) 73,233 >>>> vtechworks.lib.vt.edu / referral 62,301 >>>> google / organic 43,079 >>>> scholar.google.com / referral 6,248 >>>> >>>> The only major change to our server configuration besides the upgrade >>>> is implementing nginx. >>>> >>>> Can anyone explain what is happening? >>>> >>>> Thanks, >>>> >>>> Anne Lawrence >>>> Repository Application Administrator >>>> VTechWorks >>>> https://vtechworks.lib.vt.edu/ >>>> >>> -- >>> All messages to this mailing list should adhere to the DuraSpace Code of >>> Conduct: https://duraspace.org/about/policies/code-of-conduct/ >>> --- >>> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google >>> Groups "DSpace Technical Support" group. >>> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send >>> an email to dspac...@googlegroups.com. >>> To view this discussion on the web visit >>> https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/dspace-tech/89530c9d-b598-4a87-b516-000aaf562e30%40googlegroups.com >>> <https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/dspace-tech/89530c9d-b598-4a87-b516-000aaf562e30%40googlegroups.com?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer> >>> . >>> >> -- > All messages to this mailing list should adhere to the DuraSpace Code of > Conduct: https://duraspace.org/about/policies/code-of-conduct/ > --- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "DSpace Technical Support" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to dspace-tech+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > To view this discussion on the web visit > https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/dspace-tech/689c3caa-9353-47e4-837a-72834530b755%40googlegroups.com > <https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/dspace-tech/689c3caa-9353-47e4-837a-72834530b755%40googlegroups.com?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer> > . > -- Philip Young Institutional Repository Manager, VTechWorks <https://vtechworks.lib.vt.edu/> Email: pyou...@vt.edu | Tel: 540-231-8845 | Office: Newman Library 423 Twitter: @openatvt <https://twitter.com/openatvt> | Blog: Open@VT <https://blogs.lt.vt.edu/openvt> | Guides: Open Access <http://guides.lib.vt.edu/oa> ORCID <http://guides.lib.vt.edu/orcid> Perma.cc <https://guides.lib.vt.edu/permacc> Virginia Tech University Libraries (0434) 560 Drillfield Drive Blacksburg, VA 24061 http://www.lib.vt.edu -- All messages to this mailing list should adhere to the DuraSpace Code of Conduct: https://duraspace.org/about/policies/code-of-conduct/ --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "DSpace Technical Support" group. 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