Track user

[yllai]

Is it possible for us to know who (user) have download, copy, or print our site? May be we identify it through their ip address or username(if the page do have member login also).
Where can I get these info?

Thanks

[cgrantski]

For starters, anybody using a 'bot to download, print, or copy a site will appear in your logs as a whole lot of page hits happening very fast, much faster and more thoroughly than an individual could browse. And a lot of those 'bots leave their name in the User Agent field of the logs.

[yllai]

what means for "log" in previous post? Where can I found the "log"?

[cgrantski]

I was referring to web traffic logs. They are files that contain information about requests that come from a visitor's browser, asking for a page, an image, a script, and other things. Every request is recorded as one line in this file. Each line contains information such as: The IP address or domain of the browser making the request, the time of the request, date, which file is requested, and perhaps 15 or 20 other pieces of data about the request. One of the fields is the User-Agent field I referred to above.

The logs are almost always kept on the server that holds your web site. If the server holds more than one site, it is possible that each site has a log file of its own but it is also possible that all the sites share one large log file. It is also possible that the server does not keep any logs at all for a site. The people who set up the server made decisions about at least five things: whether logs should exist at all, where the logs should be on the hard disk, whether some parts of the site (such as directories holding only images) should not be logged, which individual pieces of information should be recorded for any request, and whether old logs should be kept or destroyed.

On IIS servers, the logs are usually named in the format ex*.log and on Apache servers the logs are often named access* and sometimes referrer* but not always. They are usually kept in a directory called "Logs" or "Logfiles" but not always.

Logs are text files and can be opened with any text editor unless they are too large. They can be exported into Excel or other programs which can make it easier to see the data in columns and sort it. (Fields in the logs are space-delimited).

Logs also can be imported into specialized programs that are called Log Analyzers or Traffic Analyzers or many other names. Some of these programs are free and some are very expensive. You'll find them mentioned many places in this forum; names include Analog, WebStats, and many others.

I hope this information helps you.