Forum Moderators: coopster
If you are trying to get something unique to know which visitors have done a certain task, then you can implement a login or just log the ip addresses.
As I recall, there was a company who accomplished such a feat but using a computer programing language. It seems that every installation of windows has a unique key entry in the registry which uniquely identifies said installation. Their program reported this key. It is however very difficult to do so without having such a reporting program on the end users computer.
Unless you happen to be extremely inventive and come up with something else, the only tools you have at your disposal as have been mentioned above are as follows.
Session
Cookie
Username
Password
email address
Question and Answer
IP Address
Browser
Operating System
Referer
Browsing Habbits
Request Time
Request Method
Request URI
Port
Connection
Encoding
Language
http Accept
Well, I hope I got that all correct and didnt just make a jackass of myself.
All the above mentioned, involve either reading something off the users computer, putting something on the users computer, recording events or a combination of all three. In order to be absolutely assured that you are uniquely identifying a user, I would suggest using all of the above. However, when is enough enough?
The only things you really need to be concerned with when attempting to track a user is the following.
1. Will the users details change.
2. Will the cookie expire.
3. Will the user delete the cookie.
4. Will the user change browser windows rendering the session mute.
When one fails, the others take up the slack and you can then repair the damage.
