Not counting participants correctly?

[Avishai Weiss]

I recently started using Split in production, and it appears that it's not counting unique users.  The dashboard is showing 7700 participants, whereas Google Analytics counts less than 400 actual uniques over the same period. Why is this the case, does it not exclude bots by default? If so how do you change that? 

[Ian Young]

Split uses a blacklist of common bots, but it's far from an exhaustive list, especially if you're getting lots of uncommon bot traffic. You can add custom blacklist entries like this:

Split.configure do |config|

  config.bots['my_bot_user_agent'] = 'Our monitoring bot'

end

If you find bots that aren't already blacklisted and are likely to affect a significant number of other sites, we appreciate pull requests.

Another approach that I'd like to see as an option (or an extension) would be to enroll participants through JavaScript - trigger a lightweight AJAX request, and only enroll participants who make the request. Bots almost never execute JavaScript, which is what lets most analytics services easily filter them out. I've played around with this on our application, but haven't had time to make a modular & bug-free version yet.

More background: https://github.com/andrew/split/issues/110

On Mon, Mar 25, 2013 at 2:42 PM, Avishai Weiss <avisha...@gmail.com> wrote:

I recently started using Split in production, and it appears that it's not counting unique users.  The dashboard is showing 7700 participants, whereas Google Analytics counts less than 400 actual uniques over the same period. Why is this the case, does it not exclude bots by default? If so how do you change that? 

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