On 08/29/2013 02:14 PM, Glen Mazza wrote:

As a compromise, perhaps we can keep the background processes collecting the referrals (so they can be used in themes as Dave mentions), but, in my view, that referral tab needs to go until it is something that does not look substantially worse than Wordpress' or GA's offerings. I still don't see the need to reproduce Google Analytics within Roller however--the fact that some people dislike Google can be met by having people linking in other third party referral tools. Again, in its present state, those who really care about referrals will not be looking at that tab anyway, they'll be using GA or one of its competitors.


Actually, I can compromise even further--How about we shut off referral tracking by default (referrers.processing.enabled in roller.properties moves from "true" to "false" OOTB) with the referrals tab not showing if the referrers.processing.enabled is set to false (only appears if it is set to true). The hit counter reset button will move to the maintenance tab so it's always available. And in the Install and/or User Guide we note the "proof of concept" level of the referrals tab (it's just there to show that Roller has in-house tracking if desired) and recommend 3rd party tracking tools if serious link analysis is desired. How does that sound?

Glen




Regards,
Glen

Mvgr,
Martin



2013/8/27 Glen Mazza <glen.ma...@gmail.com>:
Hi Team, Roller trunk still maintains a "Referrers" page for each blog
created, which gives a list of external sites which had someone click on a link taking the person to the Roller blog. This list is maintained for 24 hours only, resetting to zero at the end of each day. This information is populated from a database table and a background process that writes all
incoming referrers to that table.

Nowadays people who are interested in that information use free Google
Analytics, which is soooooo much better (stores data for months for free),
and I see no reason for us to reinvent the wheel by trying to duplicate
their service.  Those who don't care about this information won't be on
Google Analytics, but they won't be caring about that Referrer page either,
so that page really isn't helping anyone today.

So I'd like to pull out the Referrer page and move the unrelated Blog Hit
reset button on that page to the Maintenance page.  Also, remove the
background process and related classes involved with writing to the referrer table, and update the User Guide mentioning Google Analytics. We won't have a referrer table anymore in 5.1, and the 5.0-to-5.1 migration script will
just ignore the 5.0 referrer table, so it will sit dormant in 5.1
installations.  By removing the SQL processes related to storing the
referrers, it will help speed up Roller while reducing database space and
memory needs, making it easier and cheaper to deploy on ISPs/PaaSs.

WDYT?

Regards,
Glen



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