Web-crawler filtering
Web-crawlers can be a real nuisance when it comes to activity logging, especially if those logs are to be used as a means to drive applications that affect the user's experience of a website. When it comes to tracking user activity LOGman 4.4 will be more inclined to ignore these requests, giving you more accurate logs.
LOGman 4.4 peforms additional request filtering against thousands of web-crawlers (also known as bots or spiders) in an extremely efficient way. When detected, the web-crawler request gets ignored avoiding any form of logging that otherwise might be mistaken for Human activity, smart huh?
Logging HTTP headers
To bring LOGman to the next level,the next logical step was logging relevant request data. With this new data logging in place, you can looking forward to us implementing exciting new functionality.
The first direct application that came to mind was security. By analysing HTTP headers for current and past requests LOGman is now able to asses common irregularities and act accordingly, on the fly - we told you it was smart!
Log download actions once
Logging download actions once per session is a subtle but important change to the way LOGman logs activites. For instance, previous versions of LOGman logged download activities every single time a download button was clicked and the file served. While this sounds like the right behaviour, we're logging downloads, it also means that you sometimes get duplicate activities, for example, when clicking or accessing the download link multiple times during the same session. Some customers reported these duplicates as bugs, it turned out that LOGman was just doing its job as expected.
LOGman 4.4 does things a little bit differently, it'll now only count a single download activity for the same file, unless the download request comes from a different IP address. This is done to ensure that security features implemented by some plugins still trigger accurately.
Impressions logging disabled by default
Upto now, impressions logging was enabled by default when installing or upgrading LOGman. A couple of users, with high traffic sites, reported noticeable slow downs when enabling impressions logging.
After a careful analysis of our code trying to find potential bottlenecks that might be responsible for this behavior. We were eventually able to narrow it down to issues within our customers database servers, slow database writing performance that was causing bottlenecks within the webserver itself. We therefor deciced to disable this feature by default.
We encourage you to try enabling impressions logging, if there is a performance hit on the server you can always switch it back off, impressions logging can be enabled from LOGman's settings page
Changelog
Check the changelog to see what's changed since LOGman 4.3.
Get started
Track the activities and view the analytics for your Joomla website with LOGman. Go ahead and try LOGman on our demo or download it from our Dashboard. Not yet a member? Get a subscription and start using LOGman today!
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