Enable privacy-friendly web analytics for documentation

[binste]

I'd be very curious to see how many users we have on our documentation and what the content is they typically view. It could guide future work on the docs. It seems to be quite easy to enable for our PyData Sphinx theme. I'd suggest that we use plausible.io as a tracking service as it is very privacy-friendly. It's also what other packages use such as pandas and scikit-image.

Plausible has a price tag, except if you self-host it. On the PyData Sphinx theme documentation, they mention that we might be able to get a self-hosted free server at scientific-python.org. I've reached out to them beginning of January via Discord but have not yet heard back.

I'd offer to pay for it myself for at least 3 months (costs depend on traffic) so we get a good picture of what's happening. We can then decide how to continue in case we haven't heard back from the scientific-python.org maintainers.

Any thoughts? :)

[jonmmease]

I'm in favor! Thanks for researching how other projects are handling this.

[mattijn]

I think it is good idea to collect insight how users are using the documentation. I cannot find it anymore, but I remember the website of vega is using google analytics to collect these insight. I would be a bit hesitant with self-paying with 21M downloads/month on pypi

[joelostblom]

Great idea! I'm in favor as long as it is a privacy-respective alternative like the one you suggested. Getting a self-hosted server via scientific-python.org sounds like the ideal solution, so hopefully you will hear back from them.

[binste]

Heard back, we can use the service from scientific-python.org for free! :) I'll create a PR soon to configure the docs accordingly. Thank you all for the feedback.

[binste]

I've already added it to the live docs (redeployed based on the commit which was last used to build it) and opened #3346 to add it to the main branch.

The stats are accessible via an account on the views.scientific-python.org Plausible server. I'll send invite links to all Altair maintainers.

I can recommend to browse a bit through the docs and this article. Main point to be aware off when interpreting the data is that Plausible seems to be good at counting "Unique visitors" per day (without tracking personal information!) but as they do not use cookies, if you visit the same page on another day, you count as a new "unique visitor".

Thanks again @stefanv for letting us use your server! :)