Basic Stats Plugin

In the last few days I developed a little plugin (Formatter Provider) that records all the wiki page views, and generates a statistical analysis like this:

You can take a look at it here. A little roundup of the features:

• Automatic bot filtering (opt-out)
• Page hits counter
• Sessions counter
• Possibility to discard the hits generated by specific wiki usernames (such as mine, so the stats are not polluted by me checking the results every ten minutes)
• Low performance impact when recording visits (hits are stored on disk every now and then)
• Magic Word, which allows to discard requests adding a parameter to the query string (e.g. ?NoStats=1)
• Charts for daily and weekly visits distributions
• Chart for visitors’ language distribution
• Chart for visitors’ OS and browser distributions
• Possibility to let anonymous users to view the results (opt-in)
• Easy integration (the plugin records the visits by default, and in order to view the results you just have to put “{stats}” somewhere in the wiki).

The plugin is still in test, especially to ensure that it does not cause performance pitfalls on high-traffic websites, so it’s not yet included in the Plugin Pack. It’s in the nightly build, though.

I am not really into this statistics thing, so I developed this plugin in a really dummy way (but I’m sure you’ll help reporting bugs). For example, the average values displayed by the plugin are actually a prediction: the Avg. sessions/month value is calculated as the Avg. sessions/day * 30, which is actually computed as total # of sessions / fractional # of days. I’m sure the math is correct, but 14,400 sessions (= unique visitors) per month feels like a huge number, especially for a site like this which has a very small and specific audience.