Site Activity Report Through Email

This page provides detailed information about the WebCom Site Activity Reports.

WebCom provides you with email reports containing (at your option) either a summary and/or a detailed list of accesses to each hostname associated with your WebCom Account. These reports are sent automatically to userid@webcom.com.

Information in these reports is extracted from your WebCom logs of accesses, stored in subdirectories of the "logs" directory under your home directory. Only accesses listed in the "log" files, and only those accesses recorded since the last email report was generated, are reported on.

Because email delivery can sometimes be unreliable, a copy of each access report is also placed in the logs directory in the respective hostname subdirectory. The name of this file is report and is overwritten when the next access report is generated. If a report does not arrive via email, the report file can be retrieved manually by the maintainers of the account.

Format and Structure of the Report

The format and content of your Site Activity Reports can be modified through a form interface by selecting Configure Site Activity Report from the main menu of the WebCom Control Panel.

The subject line of the report mailed to you contains the number of accesses recorded since the last report, the date of the last report, and the hostname that the report is associated with. This line will appear when your mail program displays the subjects of your incoming mail.

The title of the report lists the hostname being reported on. Two lines follow, which record the total number of accesses to your account and the total number of sites and users accessing your account. This second number only roughly reflects the number of different people accessing the account. This is due to the face that if more than one user is accessing from the same site, only the accessing site will be logged, and thus the report will be unable to distinguish between them. The summary and detail report appear immediately after these two lines.

The summary report is organized in descending order by frequency of access to a particular file. The number of times each file was accessed is followed by the name of the file accessed. This enables you to immediately identify the most popular files and pages on your site.

The detailed report is organized in ascending alphabetical order by accessing user and site (when no user id was recorded). A list of the files accessed by the user, sorted in descending order by time of access follows. This enables you to roughly estimate the amount of time a particular user spent browsing your site, and see the order in which your files were accessed by a particular visitor. The information in the report can be used to distinguish casual browsers from those really interested in your site, identify repeat visitors through comparison with previous reports, and (depending on the manner in which the material is organized) to get a feel for the level of familiarity a typical visitor to your site has with the materials presented (for instance, the frequency with which visitors browse introductory information versus more advanced material). An explanation of the order and types of accessor follows.

(NOTE: Summary Report and/or Detailed Report must be checked. If neither of these options are selected, no Site Activity Report will be sent!)

Here is a sample report, containing both a summary and detail report (the default options). It covers a seven day period (the default option is one day). Both the detail and summary reports have been abbreviated for conciseness.

The detail report contains a number of different types of accessors, sorted in descending alphabetical order. A short explanation of its contents in the order they are sorted into the report follows.

• Leading special characters (such as the dash "-" in the "-gopher", the first entry of the detailed report) are listed first.
• Numerical Internet Protocol Addresses (such as 128.100.159.194) follow, listed from lowest to highest. These sites have not registered with the InterNIC, and thus do not have a domain name (such as "webcom.com/~webcom") associated with them.
• Leading capital letters (such as ANDOSRV.SAS.UPENN.EDU) and COHL@bos1d.delphi.com in alphabetical order appear next, followed by leading lowercase letters (such as anon1042@nynx10.cs.du.edu), which form the majority of accessing sites and users.

(NOTE: Please note that if you have set your Site Activity Reports to exclude files, and an accessor accesses only files that are excluded, you will receive a report that shows this accessor as visiting your site, but not accessing any pages. Also note that almost all web browsers do not pass along email addresses when requesting webpages. For this reason, email addresses almost never appear along with the other accessor information. This is a standard in modern web browser design, designed to protect the privacy of the accessor.)