Slimstat not reporting platform (and browser)

  • Resolved blogs.pennine.ddns.me.uk

    (@blogspennineddnsmeuk)


    11 years, 4 months ago

    I guess you can’t keep up with every browser out there but it would be useful if you could document a way for end users to add support for browsers in which they have a particular interest (90% of my human users visit with konqueror or rekonq, most of the rest with Safari or Chromium). However, possibly even more important is to report the platform correctly. I’m seeing my visitors using Chromium correctly reported as using Linux, but my users with konqueror and rekonq both come back as OS “Unknown”. The useragent strings being logged by apache are:

    Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/536.11 (KHTML, like Gecko) Ubuntu/12.04 Chromium/20.0.1132.47 Chrome/20.0.1132.47 Safari/536.11

    (which is reported as Chrome, but is actually Chromium – that I can live with as the browser isn’t really being entirely honest. Until the last update it was being reported as Safari, but that seems to have been fixed?)

    Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; en_GB, en_US) AppleWebKit/533.3 (KHTML, like Gecko) Ubuntu 12.04 ReKonq/0.9.1

    (being reported as “Default Browser 1” and “OS unknown”)

    Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux; en_GB) KHTML/4.8.5 (like Gecko) Konqueror/4.8

    (being reported as “Default Browser 1” and “OS unknown”)

    I’m wondering if the language strings are causing the confusion with the platform ?

    http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-slimstat/

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
  • Thread Starter blogs.pennine.ddns.me.uk

    (@blogspennineddnsmeuk)

    11 years, 4 months ago

    Actually that might be misleading – I think the visits flagged as Safari with no platform might have been one of the other browsers being dishonest – probably Chrome(-ium) was always being reported correctly. It’s a lot of work to wade through Apache logs (which retain the full user agent string) to correlate Slimstat reports with logged requests… and a lot of people have minority browsers lie about their identity to stop websites saying “your browser is not supported”.

    Andy

    Plugin Author Jason Crouse

    (@coolmann)

    11 years, 4 months ago

    Hi there,

    thank you for looking into this. WP SlimStat relies on the data provided by browscap.ini, a very popular project run for years by Gary. Unfortunately he recently announced he wasn’t able to keep it up to day anymore

    https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/browscap/pk_dkkqdXzg

    the most current version available is the one released in August 2012. There are ways to manually update the database, as explained here:

    https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/browscap/p2vDMW_X4mA

    If you want, go ahead and experiment with it, I can include your custom ini file, if needed.

    WP SlimStat, however, also include an heuristic engine that tries to guess what kind of browser was used to access the page, when the user agent doesn’t match any of the existing strings in browscap.

    Cheers,
    Camu

    PS: a vote for my plugin would be a nice way to say thank you!

    Thread Starter blogs.pennine.ddns.me.uk

    (@blogspennineddnsmeuk)

    11 years, 4 months ago

    Hmm, such a huge database of individual browser useragent strings seems like a sledgehammer to crack a nut and is clearly a nightmare to keep up to date. Thanks for drawing my attention to the project which provides this info.

    As for the vote, I’ve only been using WordPress for two months and have only test-driven half a dozen plugins. I don’t feel it is my place to be making value judgements yet – maybe after a couple of years…

    Plugin Author Jason Crouse

    (@coolmann)

    11 years, 4 months ago

    Don’t forget that WP SlimStat is used all around the world. You may all be using Chrome in the UK, but that doesn’t mean that other Countries are the same. You would be surprised to see what browsers visit my website 😉

    As for the vote, that’s okay, I’ll wait!

    Cheers
    Camu

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
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