[RESOLVED] Tracking un-registered visitors

kiwibrit

I have been asked to see the domains of visitors who hit specific links on our company site, to go alongside the number of clicks per link which we already have.

Despite a lot of searching I am struggling with this

I think the only way we could do that is to use cookies. I also think that we cannot do that if our host has set session.auto_start to "off".

Even were session.auto_start set to "on", I think it would still be tricky, as from what I have read, IP and HTTP_REFERER information is unreliable.

Have I understood correctly? If not, please help me see the light on how the task could be done. I am quite happy to be told RTFM - but I need to find TFM (in a form I can understand) in the first place.

I accept that we would have to advise our visitors that we use cookies (which they can disable) to track their use of our site.

kiwibrit

The more I read, the more I think I was way off above - but I would be grateful for any steers.

kiwibrit

From the php manual

<?php
$hostname = gethostbyaddr($_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']);

echo $hostname;
?>

Looks like a possible line to follow - particularly if I can find a database of IPs and associated domains.

kiwibrit

OK, I've tracked down a database, and I think figured out how I can record the data without delaying the visitor. if I hit any specific problems, I'll come back then.

HeyRay2

More than likely the folks browsing your website are not going to be sitting at their web server with a browser window open, so the most you can hope for tracking a users host name is their ISP.

If that's what you're going for, then you're all set with gethostbyaddr().

kiwibrit

Yes, that works well on a quick test, thank you. I have noted comments about timeout here - but that does not look like a major problem.

This has had to go an a back burner for the moment - but I shall return to it. Once again, thanks.

HeyRay2

Glad to help... 🙂