Is there a good way to distinguish between actually human hits and others. I know there is the “web crawlers” indicator, but another time I got a flash of 100 hits in an hour from one region. It just seems unlikely.

If you are interested in new themes please contact me by email at bogdan@ideance.com

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Thank you.

Posted something similar to this in Trubleshooting, I realise now it belongs here.

I have a photography portfolio site (let’s call it myname.co.uk). I have Mint running on that site at myname.co.uk/mint. I love Mint, by the way.

I’m now using Photoshelter to provide my sales & clients services. The URL is myname.photoshelter.com. I use the CNAME function with Photoshelter so that I can use the archive.myname.co.uk link in my portfolio site and that will redirect to the myname.photoshelter.com address.

If a visitor comes to Photoshelter from an ‘archive.myname’ link then most of the links they visit will start with that (retaining my branding), whereas if they go via myname.photoshelter.com all the pages they visit start with that.

I read in another post that that causes the same page to show up as two different pages, but I could live with that if Mint was working with the Photoshelter site because I am not a fan of Google Analytics.

My question is, is it possible to get Mint running on a set up like this?

And if so, how? I fully appreciate a new license would be required but if it will work I would snap it up.

Many thanks!

Given the lack of response from the only third-party location pepper, perhaps the time has come to develop an ‘official’ Locations pepper? Just a suggestion, as location is a pretty fundamental component to any stats package: I doubt many users would not want to have it installed: not being able to use it anymore is a bit unfortunate, really.

A few days ago, Mint stopped tracking visits altogether, for no apparent reason. I was still running Mint 2.18 and some of my Pepper was out of date, so I figured updating would maybe fix the issue, but it didn’t.

I sent a contact form support request to the developer but no reply has been received as of writing this post.

Testing my Mint install eventually seemed to establish that the scripts were running fine, on two different setups (one for mobile, one for desktop browsers), but that there might be issues with my Mint database that resulted in Mint no longer being able to write to it.

I tried repairing the database, to no avail.

Eventually, after saving backups of my five-year old records, I uninstalled and reinstalled Mint with a new database and just the ‘official’ Pepper installed.

Mint was now working again, albeit with past records seemingly no longer usable (importing the data from my previous database would break the fresh install again).

I then reinstalled the third-party Pepper I had been using, one by one, and eventually found that Till Krüss’s Locations+ Pepper would cause Mint to stop tracking once installed. Firebug records a 500 error when running the Mint script on the Locations+ records in the database (bizarrely, though, that error didn’t show up during testing when Mint broke a few days ago), but uninstalling Locations+ solves both issues (i.e., Mint starts tracking again and the 500 error stops).

I tried replacing Locations+ with the less powerful Locations, but bizarrely, when one tries to do this, Locations doesn’t show up in the ‘Install’ menu in Preferences.

Searches on this forum came up with a host of people with similar issues relating to tracking and/or Locations/Locations+, and no answer has been forthcoming, in some cases for several months. The issue may be related to the latest version of the Locations+ database.dat file, but setting the permissions for this file to 755 or even 777 didn’t solve it.

So it would seem basically that the current situation is this: you can install and get Mint tracking your stats for $30 per site (that’s $60 for me as I’m tracking two) but you can’t track locations unless you’re lucky enough to have an old install that hasn’t run into issues and you don’t make the mistake of upgrading it.

Whilst I do think Mint, which runs on your own server, is flexible, elegantly designed, uses no flash and operates in real time, is the best stats solution available, if the issues I describe above continue—and they seem to have affected several people for months—it basically means that you cannot track the location of your visitors anymore unless you’re willing to develop a solution for doing so yourself using the API: I think that would be acceptable if Mint were free software; for $30 I think it isn’t.

Came across Mint and from the demo very impressed. I do have a question in that in the days of Google Analytics why should one look at a system like Mint ? Perhaps this is more a sales question but it is always good to hear from people who use a product. As it purchasable by domain are there discounts if you are a designer/hosting company ?

Kind mintyness,

OrganicSpider

Right out of the box, does what it says, does it superbly & looks great. I’m absolutely flabbergasted for a geezer.

Thanx mucho for an easy, elegant, fun & of course…incredibly useful app!

Support requests are not discouraged. You gave me money, if you have a problem with Mint I want to know about it and help you fix it. Support submitted through the contact form is responded to within one or two business days (it’s just me though so I do fall behind from time to time). All licensed users are entitled to support via the contact form. If you have a problem with the way I handled a specific support request follow up with an email.

Secondly, the range of statistics is not limited. One of Mint’s guiding principles is simple but extensible. Check the Peppermill for plugins that expand Mint’s functionality. User Agent 007 provides browser and OS info. The two Locations Pepper provide varying levels of location info. And those are just the things you’ve mentioned. Mint also provides a robust plugin API for writing your own Pepper to track any additional or custom information that there isn’t already a Pepper for.

Finally, Mint uses JavaScript to distinguish between bots (spam, search and otherwise) and real users. Access log-based tracking requires actively maintained referrer spam blacklists to be useful on even a moderately popular site (something as both a user and developer I don’t want to have to worry about). JavaScript is able to catch the vast majority of legitimate visitors. This is mentioned on the Requirements page so you can make a decision before purchasing.

1. The statistics is javascript based. Javascript based website statistics software is notoriously inaccurate and is unable to log downloads of non-HTML pages. Since you install the software on your own server I was expecting it to use the access logs, which is much more accurate.

2. The range of statistics is very limited. No country, browser, OS. Only the basic visits and referrers.

3. Support is discouraged. You may not want to offer free support, which is fine, but it’s not a good idea to say answering questions makes you grumpy. For the price of the software I’d at least expect a decent amount of support though, whether it’s already answered on the website or not.

I hope Mint is a work in progress as I really like the UI. Google analytics has just as good UI, but has lots of other features. If Mint supported access logs I’m sure people would ditch Google for it.