Counting Users

Counting Distinct Users based on IP address

[Cf_Guy]

I'm developing a web stats program in cold fusion for a company I work for. Right now I'm tracking users based on IP address.

A user hits on a webpage and it logs the ip address and the pagename that person hit on, which generates 2 hits to that page but only 1 distinct user hit.

The problem I'm running into is that everyone from my company shows up on the same IP address. So I mght have 100 distinct in-house computers hitting on a page, but it will only show up as 1 distinct hit. Is there a better way of tracking users than what I'm currently doing?

[Brett_Tabke]

Nope - you have hit on the crux of the problem. Now multiply that times 28million AOL users off a few c-blocks of their proxy cache spider. Oh ya, - throw in MSN, Verizon, and etal.

The alternatives are not pretty.

- tracking each user with cookies. ugh.
- session id tracking all users. ugh ugh.
- complex agent id tracking in relation to ip and time. ugh ugh ugh.
- hiring a tech team to tell you the same.

[Zaphod Beeblebrox]

Sometimes, not aften though, you can get someone's real IP-number through server variable HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR. This will give the user's IP-number instead of the proxyserver's IP-number.

[BjarneDM]

you can get somewhat better statistics by using the combination of IP-number and User-Agent - but of course it's still not perfect - and as stated previously - never will be :-(