Tracking Unique Visitors - ACCURATELY

jariizumi

I've been looking for an effective way to accurately measure the number of unique visitors. I originally used IP's, but found that to be too restrictive since people behind routers with NAT/ip-masquerading only appear through one IP; thus, the system would only record 1 hit per the number of computers behind the firewall system. I tried using cookies, but they produce two problems: one being that cookies can easily being deleted, and the second being that not all people accept cookies. Cookies are so easily hackable, that I don't know what would be best - whether to stick with IP's, or to believe that the person who keeps deleting their cookies is either the same person deleting cookies or another computer on the network. Anyone have a foolproof mechanism that might help, or any resources on the matter? Thanks for any help.

Anon

Sessions maybe. Though then again, I stopped using counters, heh...

jariizumi

Sessions use unique SESSID's stored in cookies or through TRANSID. Assuming that they can just get rid of either one, the system can be cheated quite easily, which isn't exactly what we want. I'm not sure what can be done to make a non-cheatable system... even with making system profile hashes, there is a limitation on how much information can be gleaned from JavaScript... Installing an ActiveX component is too big... Checking to see if the person has a cached copy is also too cheatable... Is it even possible to make an uncheatable tracking system?

Anon

The only way to track accurately is by asking them to login. Then you know exactly who they are and you can keep a history of what that user did in a database.

Diego

jariizumi

The problem is that we can't ask people to really login to the system. As a 3rd party provider, we can't insert a login interface.

I know that this is possible, because there are many services, etc. out there that depend on accurate counting, i.e., advertising companies that pay money based on how many unique people visited, etc. So I'm sure there's some way to make the tracking work.