It works. Kind of.

  • septim

    (@septim)


    1 year ago

    The plugin is simple, clean, not too difficult to understand with many links to tutorials, has clear upgrade options but doesn’t beg everywhere, nice UI. Seems pretty lightweight (only few settings enabled so far), and I appreciate the dark mode and the dashboard stats.

    Many options are behind the paywall, okay. I did not try the paid version since I won’t be using 3/4 of it, but might in the future, when the site gets decent traffic. Not sure if activating more settings will add more load to the site, though.

    However. There is absolutely no geographical data displayed, and no link to the documentation about it. So I went to the developer’s site and thanks to the AI assistant I could easily add a (large) file to my site. We’ll see if it works.

    Now, IPs change. Even from the same device at the same location. I would suggest to place the warning about the current admin IP not being blocked in the dashboard window so we can either disable it quickly from there, or open the settings to do it and be done with it before working on the website.

    I find the annual fee for the paid version quite high. Now there seems to be a time-limited 45% discount available, that’s been there for so long it looks like a “permanent discount” (a practice a lot of developers use to alter the percieved value, illegal in many countries), which is not a discount but the normal price. Still sounds high to me, even “discounted”.

    Overall a nice tool. Thanks :o)

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • Plugin Author Ben Sibley

    (@bensibley)

    1 year ago

    Thanks for the review.

    Independent Analytics will ignore your activity as an admin as long as you are logged-in. If you aren’t logged in, there is an option in the Settings menu that will let you know if your current IP is blocked, and there is a button you can click to add it to the block list. If your IP is dynamic, you can use a wildcard or CIDR notation to block a range of IP addresses, and we have more info about that here. We are looking into an option to add a cookie to recognize yourself, which might work better for dynamic IPs.

    As for the pricing, this is basically a mistake on our part. We launched with a 60% discount and switched to a 45% discount within a few months. We then spent a long time developing free features, so it didn’t make any sense to increase the price. I understand how it looks weird at this point. We will be reducing the discount to 30% after launching the upcoming Overview report feature.

    Thread Starter septim

    (@septim)

    1 year ago

    Hey Ben, thanks for the reply.

    Actually I’m trying to limit the “false” page views from the numerous site tests on different devices and browsers, which the logged-in protection cannot manage. I don’t know if the admin cookie option you are considering can address this, but any solution is welcome.

    Yes, the block IP option is nice, but when the IP changes (and we can’t know about it), we have to go into the settings to check if the current IP is still blocked. Hence the suggestion to let admins know from the dashboard.

    Not a big deal, though; hopefully, we’ll have enough visitors soon for it to be a drop in the virtual ocean. ;o)

    Plugin Author Ben Sibley

    (@bensibley)

    1 year ago

    Okay I understand what you mean now. That is much harder to detect, but we’ll see what we can come up with.

    If you have a dedicated testing period before the real traffic arrives, you could reset the data via the Settings menu. I’m not sure if that applies well for your circumstances, but it may help.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)

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