pop me up
It’s quite some years I have been using a free webstats4u account to track visitors on my websites.
Now its seems like they didn’t get enough money from people visiting the statistics pages so they felt they should add a popup to websites containing their counter.
Their general terms of service says:
With the installation of Webstats4U on the site it is accepted that WMS has the right to place advertisements on the site in any format or through any channel, including but not limited to e-mail, layer ads, pops, banners and other usual formats without any forewarning and it is furthermore accepted that WMS takes no responsibility for the advertising content and that WMS shall not be liable for any losses incurred regarding this advertising.
Now, why the hell should i use such a service?
I found I could use a free GPLed statistics script in PHP like BBClone.
It takes some space on your website (4.5MB because of a database file that associates IPs to countries and because of icons associated to these countries and to common web robots) but it does not take a lot to set it up and it’s pretty nice.
Maybe it doesn’t offer the same features as webstats4u, but it has all you may need to understand who is interested in your website.
As a developer I am mainly concerned about my visitors country of origin (so I know where I should better localize my products) and their OS.
I managed to install the scripts on my sourceforge.net accounts too. To do this you need to use the /tmp/permanent directory to store session data.
Thanks to the BBClone developers for their nice open source project 