Google analytics on Bitcoin.org

[gmaxwell]

I dunno if anyone will care, but Google Analytics was added to Bitcoin.org today without any prior notice.  https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin.org/issues/285

This was somewhat controversial when it was proposed in the past.

If you don't want a third party tracker keeping a record of your visits, it would probably be best to not visit right now. ... presumably anyone who actually cares has completely blocked Google Analytics already, but I thought wide disclosure of this would be prudent since it even took me by surprise, and I follow all the changes to Bitcoin.org.

[BitCoinDream]

who is going to be the owner of the gmail account associated with the analytics ? Saivann ?

[Daily Anarchist]

Why not use Piwik? At least it's free and open-source software, and you can run your own instance, instead of having some third party get the data.

I've been using it for years. It's high quality.

[blockgenesis]

I made this change (and opened an issue to make sure anyone watching the repository was aware of that change, I didn't intend to hide anything)

FWIW, this was already discussed before:
https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin.org/issues/121

While I think it is particularly useful, Analytics wasn't setup at the time and I agree with this decision. I am OK with gmaxwell request to "follow the rule" and always use pull req. I just didn't think there would be issues, especially given that this was a temporary measure to help us moving to a dedicated server, which actually improves privacy (no more GitHub pages).

As for getting statistics, once there is a dedicated server, I thought it would be great to have our own statistics (and I personally have no problem making this information public if others agree). Yet, make sure we periodically purge IP logs and never leak this information.