United Kingdom Tracking

[Bluebeary]

I have been using statcounter for several months and it is great! I do, however, have several family and friends in England and Wales who view my family sites regularly.

Their visits never seem to be counted. Is there a reason? I can see when family and friends in Australia, the US, Canada and elsewhere visit. Why not the United Kingdom?

Any suggestions welcomed.

Cheers and keep up the good work/Bluebeary

[webado]

I have been using statcounter for several months and it is great! I do, however, have several family and friends in England and Wales who view my family sites regularly.

Their visits never seem to be counted. Is there a reason? I can see when family and friends in Australia, the US, Canada and elsewhere visit. Why not the United Kingdom?

Any suggestions welcomed.

Cheers and keep up the good work/Bluebeary
I can't imagine why their visits wouldn't be recorded, other than perhaps their IP addresses may resolve to non-UK ISP's, or if they systematically use various proxies or they prevent access to the Statcounter site by blocking it as a host in their pc's host list.

[Bluebeary]

I HAVE had a couple of visits registered but not for a long time. The vast majority don't get counted. I believe the users that I know are not being counted use AOL as their ISP. Could this make a difference?

Yes! AOL are the worst - they use this dynamic web proxy - so the user's IP address changes on EACH request. It's horrible. There is almost no way know to man to accurately geo-locate an AOL user.

[tom]

Yes! AOL are the worst - they use this dynamic web proxy - so the user's IP address changes on EACH request. It's horrible. There is almost no way know to man to accurately geo-locate an AOL user.

sounds like a challange !

[daveuk]

sorry to drag this up but i tihnk there is a solution to the AOL user problem... you said there is no way to track where they are - why not grab their language off their pc?

(idea from http://javascript.internet.com/user-details/language.html)

what i mean is if you notice its an AOL ip address then the php script could then excrute the javascript code and get their language on the pc ie: en-uk would equal uk so it would go down as a uk visitor and en-us would be american..

Just an idea!

[webado]

The pc's own settings ought to be protected against this kind of intrusion by various privacy and security settings.

[daveuk]

hmm.. is it blocked for you? - my norton isnt blocking it for me :S strange.

[webado]

Oh, OK, I saw what the script does. Yeah, it sort of works, if I don't have javascript disabled (which I don't) and if the language is set to also define the country in a meaningful way.

As it is I think I have it defined as en-us even though I'm in Canada. More over, if I travel with my laptop and use it in different countries, I will most likely use free AOL and I definitely won't be changing the language designation.

As well I have 3 languages set on my pc, which I switch among regularly: English, French and Spanish. This switches the keyboard but also the entire language designation as it is used in applications such as MS Word, in order to get the correct dictionary, for the language.

The most that this script can be used with any accuracy is to determine the language used at the moment by the user, but not the actual country.

The problem isn't that no country is identified through the geo-location database, it is rather that you can't be sure if it it correct at all times, especially for AOL, but also other ISP's - because the IP addresses used are in blocks of ip addresses whose details are not being maintained by the ISP's accurately either because they get reassigned at the drop of a hat to totally different locations around a large given geographical area, or simply because the ISP's can't be bothered to make the corrections in a timely fashion in all the geo-location databases out there.

[daveuk]

good point but any tacking is better then none?

thanks for your comments.