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GoatCounter v1.2.0 Release Notes

Release Date: 2020-05-18 // almost 4 years ago

  • ⚡️ There are a number of changes in 1.2, and a few which require a bit of action when updating. Also see: https://www.arp242.net/goatcounter-1.2.html

    Password authentication (#232)

    🗄 The email-based authentication has been deprecated in favour of password authentication.

    Action required Use the interface to set a password (you will get a notification about this). Email authentication still works, but will be removed in the next release, after which updating the password will be tricky.

    Unique visit tracking (#212)

    GoatCounter now tracks unique visits (without using cookies).

    📚 Technical documentation about the implementation is in doc/sessions.markdown.

    There are two ways to display the older stats:

    Do nothing; meaning that "visits" will be 0 for previous date ranges.

    Assign a new 'session' to every hit, so that unique visits will be the same as the number of pageviews.

    Doing option 2 is a potentially expensive database operation and not everyone may care so it's not done automatically; instructions for doing this are:

    SQLite (do not do this on a running system; as far as I can tell there's no good way to get the next sequence ID while incrementing it):

    delete from sessions;
update hits set session=id, first_visit=1;
update sqlite_sequence set seq = (select max(session) from hits) where name='sessions';

    PostgreSQL:

    update hits set session=nextval('sessions_id_seq'), first_visit=1;

    And then run goatcounter reindex.

    👌 Improve bot detection (#219)

    ⚡️ The bot detection is now improved; this will be applied to older pageviews in the database with a migration, but the cached statistics aren't updated automatically (as it can take a while for larger sites). Use the reindex command to fully update older pageviews (this is entirely optional).

    Track events (#215)

    📚 There is now better support to track events; see the updated documentation on the Site Code page for details.

    👍 Better support for campaigns (#238)

    There is now a "campaign parameters" setting; if the URL matches one of these parameters it will be set as the referrer (overriding the Referer header).

    The default is utm_campaign, utm_source, ref.

    👍 Better export (#221)

    The export was a quick feature added in the first version, but didn't scale well to larger sites with a lot of pageviews. This now works well for any number of pageviews.

    🛠 Many small improvements and bug fixes

    🍱 It's almost 2 months of work, and there have been many small changes, fixes, and improvements. I didn’t keep track of them all 😅