What is Reddit's opinion of AWStats?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

I don't mind server-side traffic logs. Of course website owners want to see which pages are popular and where traffic is coming from. Like AWStats.

And you have better control over that as a visitor. E.g. don't send or spoof referrer headers, user agent, etc. Instead of some client-side javascript, and worse if the site breaks when it's blocked.

If you have access to the webserver logs, are there any reasons (other than ease of setup/cost) to use a privacy first client side analytics system when you could use something like AWStats to get possibly even richer data?

I host my own . . .

Javascripts at js.domainname.com
Fonts at fonts.domainname.com
CSS at css.domainname.com
Images at images.domainname.com

The various javascripts are kept up to date via a cronjob.

I also coded my own ad service that uses Amazon's tags (no data transmitted to Amazon until you click the link [which is how the web works])

Analytics? Web server logs + AWstats

 

So, no third party stuff at all.

I would (and do) use a weblog analyzer like Webalyzer or AWstats.

I previously considered Open Web Analytics, but the PHP script that analyzes the $_SERVER supervariable during a page request results in a big performance hit, and as a matter of policy I don't allow spyware of any sort, so the JavaScript version is off the table.

I just want to know the basics of how many visitors I'm getting, who's referring them, how many and which pages they view, and so on. AWstats does the trick for me.

To clarify: AWstats isn't a analytics program - it's a log viewer.

Your webserver keeps logs of all visitors & what they do on your website. AWstats presents those logs in a nice, viewable format.

Demo available: https://www.awstats.org/

> Has anyone tried building their own analytics tracking system?

I built a very simple one for one of my sites that is server side only (collating data from webserver logs), which of course limits what can be collected, but from a privacy point of view it is much better and never suffers from users blocking javascript analytics programs.

AWStats works in the same way. It's definitely not as good as GA or Matomo, or the others mentioned here, but it is fully server-side, which depending on your goals may be a good or a bad thing.

What stats do you need? Page views should still be visible if WP hasn't completely abandoned any stats in preference for Google.

Old skool awstats only uses web server log parsing which respects privacy more. I wonder if brave blocks their old skill browser tracking techniques.

Ahh, ok. It's possible they wouldn't differentiate torrent traffic from any other traffic in that high port range but I wonder. Anyways you can definitely host it locally, the only considerations to be made once you pick a web server to use would be setting bandwidth/connection limits and HTTPS up as well as some sort of monitoring/logging solution. If you want to go further from there, most server software will have plugins for download forwarding and other mitigation to make inappropriate scraping harder. A couple self-hosted log monitoring options I've used and found decent are goaccess and Awstats (not an Amazon product, despite the name).

AWstats maybe? I'm not sure if they support updating a mysql DB.

But:

>Analysis database can be stored in XML format for XSLT processing

Maybe some cron magic and a script to convert xml data to put it in a DB

Small edit: I'd like to share my ELK experience as i just have been able to set it up. I'd say that is way better if you have the resources. Very extendable and not limited to log files.