Uniquely Identify Surfers?

Proxies are starting to mess my stats.

[Noname_Nick]

I'm sorry if this is a repost. I track users via IP address. A growing number of our users are behind proxies and the like and this is making it difficult to uniquely identify surfers.

Does anyone know of any algorithms or suggestions which help this situation.

Thanks!

[antoineFR]

Hello;

You could :

1. Use session to track your visitor.
It work with different IP but it stop when the
visitor close its browser.
Session can be handled by dynamic language (PHP,ASP,JSP,PERL...)

2. use cookie.
But it can be banned by the browser...

Cheers.
Antoine.

[Noname_Nick]

Thanks - I was thinking it would be nice to track users between sessions without the need for cookies, but I think that cookies or possibly cookie-less sessions will probably work. I came across a table (on Urchin or google analytics) which looking at how it tracks users. It used a combination of things which together handled proxies and the like. I was originally wondering if anyone had implemented that algorithm.

NN