Hi guys… I am trying to develop a Stat Counter for OJS. Today, I installed it for our journal. I hope it can help others. It is just a simple stat counter that counts Visitors, Unique Visitors, and PageViews. Perhaps, we can develop it to be better. Here is how it appears:
The image is removed because it contains my IP Address.
If you are interested to try, you can download and see the instructions from my blog [here]. If you want to see how it works, you can see our journal statistic page [here]. Thank you.
Any suggestions will be appreciated, but please, I am not an experienced programmer.
Links have been removed because the pages are no longer available.
Two fast questions to understand the work and the motivation:
a) Why did you decide to develop a new app instead of use existing third-party ones like Plausible o Matomo?
b) As you will probably know, GoogleAnalytics is declared illegal in some countries of the UE because it stores the user’s IP address (that is considered personal data). Is your plugin storing this data too? If it’s, is there any plan to hash or anonymize it to be GDPR-compliant?
Thank you very much for making me aware of the IP address and GDPR. I was not aware of it. Currently, the program stores the user’s IP Address for the program to count the unique visitors. I will try to hash or anonymize it (any suggestion about how to do it will be much appreciated). The reason why I decided to develop this app instead of using existing third-party apps is that I want a smaller app, easy to use, fast-loading, simpler, free (free to use and free to change, open-source), and I want to develop my programming skill. The most important reason, however, I want to contribute as best as I can to provide a StatCounter alternative. The program is now withdrawn from the internet. I will improve it.
Long story short… you can process the IP (to know the country) and then store it removing the last byte.
The downside of this is you can not reprocess your logs (or if you do it the country detection won’t be as precise), but is the price to pay to keep user’s private data safe.
Thanks for your recommendation (to remove the last byte of the IP address). I will try to store the country (into DB) before anonymizing the IP address and then store the anonymized IP.
Update:
EasyStat beta is now ready. I have done some changes by following Marc’s suggestions (thank you again). Information, download link, and instruction can be seen here. I hope this can be a helpful contribution to this team.
First of all, many thanks.
Would you consider developing this as a plugin?
It would be nice if we could also include journals that are not in the same domain?
Thank you for giving direction to the future of the program. Let us see how it goes so we can decide whether to develop the program as a plugin or to make it available for journals hosted in different domains. Currently, I just want to keep it simple (monitoring just the journals hosted in the same domain) and easy (can be monitored just by one person for all the journals stats).