Session Tracking, How do you track multi sessions from the same user

[jezzer300]

I am very pleased with my session tracking which filters out robots quite well and deals with cookie/non-cookie users.

While my site isn't busy I can clearly see the same user come back several times with a different session ID, beacuse they're browser doesn't accept cookies.

Has anyone found a fairly reliable way to tie these visits together and say - yes it's the same person/session.

It would be easy on a quiet system to tie up the same IP address, agent, browser details etc. But when it gets more busy it could be someone else.

I know it's a non-cookie user and could reflect that in my stats, which is maybe the best option...

Any soloutions here?

[coopster]

If the session id is changing, then you have a new session -- period. HTTP is stateless meaning there is a disconnect on every request. If the user decides to shut down there browser in the meantime or close your site page and open a new page, there isn't much you are going to be able to do.

[hakre]

as coopster wrote, there is not much to do left. but some:

track ip addresses

feed each user agent with it's own urls (kind of session cookie failover by adding session ids to each url)

use flashplugin and tie session to userdata

but beware of the limitations you can imagine. http is stateless and cookie based sessions are only a little work-around for that. so each request is a "new" request.