Administrative and Maintenance Tools - Google Analytics in the Archive (and Forum) by BOP5

Brought to you by BirdOPrey5
www.Qapla.com

Upgraded to version 1.6 - Updated option to put code in header OR footer on forum pages.

• Header - Recommended location by Google for the Asyncronous Code (the popular code)
• Footer - Recommended location for non-Async (legacy) tracking code.

I strongly urge everyone to confirm with google your code is working by checking the analytics the next day after installing to confirm your hits are bing registered. The google tool for confirming the code is on the page is not good enough!

The main purpose of this mod was originally to add your Google Analytics code to the archive. The archive traditionally gets overlooked because the standard instructions of copying your analytics code into the footer doesn't cover the archive.

You simply copy and paste the full analytics code Google gives you into the mod options and enable it.

Optionally you can also use this mod to put your analytics code in the regular forum (non-archive) as well, however if you have already manually put your analytics code in the footer you should leave this option disabled.

To confirm it is working go to your archive and view the source on any archive page. At the bottom directly above the VB Copyright info should be your google code.

I have tested this on 4.0.8, 4.1.12, and 4.2.0 and it will work in all 4.0.x and 4.1.x /4.2.x at least.

For a VB 3.8 version see here: https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=246171

You won't see any indication on the pages but you can demo the product at:
www.qapla.com/mods/

Please mark as installed if you use this.
Donations Always Appreciated. :up:

English - Download .zip file. Version 1.6
Arabic - Translated by Dr. OsamA - Download .xml file. Version 1.13 (old version)

[BirdOPrey5]

Thanks for confirming... I would check your plugins for any mods on the "member_location" hook first.

[bosken]

Installed on v.4.1.1 Works

[HughM]

Nice mod. I'd put the code into the template manually, but it's nice to have it nicely configurable...

[HughM]

I'm going to have to take back my "Nice mod" comment...

You have a nasty bug in your code, and I've now got no idea where, on our website's launch day, people came from, or what they did. This was important to me.

Your mod allows admins to have the code inserted into both the archives and the main forum. The archives bit works fine, but on the main , when it inserts the code, it has escaped each and every quote...

My main forum footer had something like the following in:

<script type=\"text/javascript\">

  var _gaq = _gaq || [];
  _gaq.push([\'_setAccount\', \'UA-########-#\']);
  _gaq.push([\'_trackPageview\']);

  (function() {
    var ga = document.createElement(\'script\'); ga.type = \'text/javascript\'; ga.async = true;
    ga.src = (\'https:\' == document.location.protocol ? \'https://ssl\' : \'http://www\') + \'.google-analytics.com/ga.js\';
    var s = document.getElementsByTagName(\'script\')[0]; s.parentNode.insertBefore(ga, s);
  })();

</script>

Which was never going to work...

Obviously, we didn't pay for it, and there's no guarantee that it'll work, but it's still incredibly annoying, and I'm sure others will be very appreciative of a fix to this one...

[BirdOPrey5]

Wow very sorry about this. I do see the bug and have fixed it and released a new version. I did use the check in google analytics to confirm the code was on the page, I don't understand how it confirmed it with the bad code.

Anyway here is a copy and paste of the code from my actual page with this code from version 1.5:

<!--Google Analytics in (Forum) Begin--> 
<script type="text/javascript">
var gaJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? "https://ssl." : "http://www.");
document.write(unescape("%3Cscript src='" + gaJsHost + "google-analytics.com/ga.js' type='text/javascript'%3E%3C/script%3E"));
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-5383701-1");
pageTracker._setSessionTimeout("3600");
pageTracker._trackPageview();
</script> 
<!--Google Analytics in (Forum) End--> 

As to why this bug was there, it seems in the VB 3.x version the add-slashes is necessary (as they are removed before being output) but not so in VB 4.x.

[OldSchoolDSL]

Upgraded to 1.5 (allow overwrite, yes)

Installed

4.1.1

To the best of my knowledge, its working.

[HughM]

Thanks for the speedy update... Will install and give it a go...

Someone else pointed out that we've still got awstats running on the server, so we've got some idea of what went on and where people came from...

Anyone know if you can give google analytics a chunk of access.log and get it to update itself? That'd be very cool to be able to do...

[OldSchoolDSL]

This was a wonderful modification and well thought out. It works flawlessly in 4.1.2.

vBSEO has this build in it (Google Analytics) though and I'm converting to Mint, which runs locally and does not depend on an outside link (in this case, Google).

Un-installed.

[BirdOPrey5]

I looked at Mint but it's requirement for javascript to be on to count a hit kind of defeats the purpose of self hosted analytics IMO. The biggest issue with Google isn't load times but that if someone is browsing with noscript enabled (like I'd imagine your users might be prone to do) Google will never count them. Mint won't either though.

[OldSchoolDSL]

Originally Posted by BirdOPrey5

I looked at Mint but it's requirement for javascript to be on to count a hit kind of defeats the purpose of self hosted analytics IMO. The biggest issue with Google isn't load times but that if someone is browsing with noscript enabled (like I'd imagine your users might be prone to do) Google will never count them. Mint won't either though.

This is true... Users running noscript (http://noscript.net) are not always be counted. Know of any alternatives for local tracking?

This was a very useful modification though and you should be very proud of the work you help provider here for this community.