保留唯一文章查看次数记录的最有效方法是什么

Question

I am trying to create an article based website using codeigniter. When any article is requested to fetch from database for viewing, I use the following code to mark the number of unique view of each article in a separate table called "hits".

mysql_query("INSERT INTO hits(ip,article_slug,hitcount) 
             VALUES('$ip_address','$id',1)
           ON DUPLICATE KEY UPDATE hitcount=hitcount+0");

I take the IP address of the user and get the value of article_slug from $this->uri->segment(3); and then run the above mysql query.

I am using the IP address here to get the number of unique views, but it suddenly occurs to me that several people could be using the same IP address. So in that case my query above doesn't seem effective.

So I was wondering what is the most effective way to do it. One of my friends was talking about doing it using cookies instead of IP address. Do you think its a good idea or there is a better way of doing it?

Could you please give me an idea on how to do this?

Thanks in Advance :)

Answer 1

I would recommend using Google Analytics and setting up a Custom Report that tracks only article views. This would give you the insights you seek plus a lot more and it would avoid counting bots (like Google, Bing or a SPAMer).

But if you defiantly want to track users on your own I would recommend tracking the IP address in one field and Session ID in another.

session_start();

$user['ip']  = $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'];
$user['sid'] = session_id();

Answer 2

The reason behind using cookie is that if some group of user is behind proxy you will get same ip-address for all the user who read your article which is wrong.

So you can use combo of both and that way you could get better results. You can either use cookie or session. But if you use cookie and give it an expiry period of about a year or more and if you specify some unique hash to the cookie (which could be md5 of the log table's primary key) and then you can track users pretty well.

let me know if you do not understand what I mean.