Getting the unique user

Swedie

in a stats script, to ensure you have a UNIQUE user, what Info do you need to pull from the user? Please help me. it's important I get this info.

DeltaRho2K

You would need to get their IP address at a minimum... The only problem is even that isn't always going to account for all of your truly unique hits... For example, if any one of the 200 people in my company hit your website, it would all come from the same IP address, since that is what my firewall is putting out.

You could use something like this to get the IP address:

$clientip	= getenv("HTTP_CLIENT_IP");

Swedie

yes, aware of that problem.

so $clientip = getenv("HTTP_CLIENT_IP"); would grab the IP of the computer and not the outgoing IP from their network?

along with that, what else would you use to ensure you have unique user?

DeltaRho2K

No,
$clientip = getenv("HTTP_CLIENT_IP");

would grab the IP address broadcast by the Firewall. Basically, you have no way of getting a unique IP address from any of my users' computers.

If you are dealing with anonymous surfing, (what I mean by this is that they don't actually log into your site), then the IP address is about the only thing you have... (Now, you could incorporate a timestamp), but that wouldn't ensure uniqueness 100% either, based on my scenario, but could help to "Unique-ize" the surfing... (By setting up a 5 minute period between IP hits, for example)

Swedie

yeah, the company I'm at believe there is something you can pull from the user that is permanent. But I can't see what that would be.

I need some type of unique user identifyier.

i guess it's just the IP and hostname then?

Ravenous

The only thing you can guarantee every visitor to your site would have is an associated IP address. But as mentioned above, machines behind proxies, firewalls, routers.. will generally have private IPs and will browse the internet with a single public IP. One thing that is absolutely unique is the MAC address on the NIC, but there's currently no method of getting that across the internet. It is possible to get this number as this is how networking actually works, but there's no real way to get a user's agent to pass that info along to your server. Perhaps you could work on that..? 😃

But who's to say that would be completely accurate? Different users can use the same machine. Who's to say that the person using the machine with MAC address 'X' is the same one who was using it earlier?

I've got it! Biometrics. We can require all computer users to log into their machines with a thumbprint. That thumbprint is sent to your/a server via HTTP and checked against a local database of all thumbprints that have visited the site. I'm a genius!!

Swedie

alright. gotcha

...

Our company apparently want to find a unique BROWSER identifyier so that if a person goes from one of our sites to the other, this person is recognized.

How would that work? Could it be done?

DeltaRho2K

OK, are you dealing with surfers in general, or do the people physically log into your sites?

Either way, you will probably have to setup sessions, or cookies for this. (The only difference between general surfing or logging in would be in how you could identify them)

For example, if a surfer was logged into your site, you could use sessions or a cookie to set their loginID, and unique index from your table. Then each page could call that cookie (or sesion) to ge the user's credentials, and let them through without having to log back in.

If it is just a general surfer, then you would have to get their IP address, and basically do the same (store that in a cookie or session)...