So I KNOW historically Django has been anti any sort of tracking. Heck, we don’t even have a list of users really, aside from Google Groups. But if the PSF can use Plausible and use it to help understand the community better on docs.python.org, maybe we can too?
Especially if/when the new website redesign comes out, having a little knowledge of the user base would help around international features, accessibility, and so on.
What kind of information are you after exactly (hits per page, geographic distribution, …)? Also, would this be a oneoff thing, or is the idea to have this data public and updated (live?) somewhere?
Personally, don’t have any opposition to adding Plausible and I don’t think it would be too challenging technically (famous last words ). However, I think it would be helpful to know the questions we’re trying to answer by adding analytics, rather than only saying “let’s have analytics”.
Thanks for the thoughtful response. I agree we need to be more specific in what we’re looking for. My off-the-cuff response is it’d be nice to know more about users and the docs beyond what we currently have via the Django Developers Survey. So that would mean what you mentioned:
geographic distribution
hits per page
would be interesting to follow the funnels of traffic, like where do people go after Polls? How many people make it to the end of Polls, etc?
But there should be an overriding question first before we just grab data. Maybe someone from the Translations team has insight here.
My BIG, BIG wish (echoing @carlton here) is to one day have a Docs Fellow who can look at all the docs collectively and make changes. That person would definitely benefit from this information, but we’re a ways off from that at the moment.
Some data around click through rate and views on the PyCharm banner, donations page, and sponsors pages could be useful in terms of tracking the effectiveness of the website (and then proposing updates) and give them stats they can tell prospective sponsors. If they were thinking of putting advertisements on the Django website, for example, this might help with those discussions.
I love this idea! I’d love to get it running for about 2-4 weeks on all pages of djangoproject.com and docs.djangoproject.com so we get a baseline level of information about users of those websites at this point in time.
Then on an ongoing basis I’d prefer being able to turn the tracking on and off as needed to answer specific questions. Without the specific questions / kept on indefinitely, not keen on the extra internet bloat.