Collect usage metrics

[To1ne]

In #2046 we're thinking about giving the site a refresh. To better fit the needs of the users it would be nice if we can collect usage metrics (anonymized) to see which pages are hit the most.

[To1ne]

At the moment we use CloudFlare. This is the current data we have for the last 30 days (as shared by Taylor):

It would be better to get more finegrained details about which pages are being visited.

We can extend this, but this is what Taylor said about that:

That's right; we don't track any sort of behavior once someone has landed on the site. The only information that I can see in Cloudflare is the traffic that flows directly through Cloudflare by region. I personally like that we don't capture any more details than that as a privacy matter, but I may be in the minority there. If others feel like we should capture more detailed analytics, someone should start that discussion :-).

I agree, we should collect metrics with user privacy in mind first.

@dscho replied:

Hopefully Cloudflare offers fine-grained analytics that completely skip any Personally-Identifiable Information (such as region!) and instead include valuable information about e.g. the most visited sites, or common travel routes (e.g. front page -> docs -> git-commit -> git add or some such).

To which Taylor responded:

I think that this is what their Web Analytics product is for. I am happy to enable that if folks are interested. It looks like Cloudflare can munge the response to inject Javascript before the end of the .

Personally I'd like to avoid injecting JS for this. I don't think we need this anyway. I'm not familiar with CloudFlare myself, but I found this article: https://www.burgeonlab.com/blog/cloudflare-web-analytics-rum-injected-tracking-beacon-script-into-my-sites/

It seems to me you can have more details Web Analytics, without injected that JS. @ttaylorr would you mind having a look into this?

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Privacy was a concern for more people in that discussion, but I like what Scott [said]:

Technically it's not us sharing data with a third party - the traffic is going through them, we're in this case asking them to share it with us, which is a little funny. From a privacy perspective, they already know all this data, it's a little ridiculous to care that then we can see basic page hit breakdowns of our own vistors.

So personally I don't object using CloudFlare to collect (and report) these metrics to us (=Git PLC). But @dscho disagree:

Honestly, all this behind-the-scenes and holding-close-to-ones-chest stuff appears counter-productive to me. Git is an open project, and the Git homepage should be developed equally openly. If we cannot have analytics that everybody can see (because privacy or any other obstacle), they're not worth having, as far as I am concerned.

I've opened this issue to start collecting this data, this can be a shortrunning project (couple of months) and publish the data here. If we feel we're infringing user's privacy, we can disable it again afterward.

[ttaylorr]

It seems to me you can have more details Web Analytics, without injected that JS.

I did some reading through Cloudflare's documentation here, and it looks like the JS snippet they inject is only for what they call "Real User Monitoring (RUM)". Their settings panel doesn't specify what "RUM" metrics are, but some searching indicates this is more about performance (TTFB, FCP, LCP, CLS, etc.) than anything else.

So turning on Cloudflare's "Web Analytics" feature can be done without injecting any Javascript. That won't show us any of the web performance metrics listed earlier, but from my reading of the previous issue I don't think that seem to be the primary thing we're interested in anyway.

Cloudflare doesn't have a comparable feature to, say, Google Analytics's flow analysis tools, so we won't be able to learn how users move from one page to another. But it will give us information about how many visits each path gets, which I think is a useful starting point. If we want to learn more about how users move between pages, perhaps setting up Umami would be useful, but I'd rather collect a minimal amount of data first.

I enabled Web Analytics a few minutes ago (without the Javascript blob), and confirmed the metrics that Cloudflare tracks don't contain any PII. If this turns out to be wrong, I agree with @To1ne that when we revisit this in a couple of months we should disable the feature if it is somehow infringing on users' privacy.