On 05/17/2012 07:53 AM, Kaspar Brand wrote: > -1, please revert. Before starting to track users on httpd.apache.org > with GA, I would expect two things to happen: a discussion/vote on > httpd-dev (as was the case for the commentary system) and - provided > that the vote passes - having a privacy policy for the HTTP server > project in place [1]. Lack of the latter is a blocker even for tiny > changes to http://httpd.apache.org/docs/trunk/ right now, which is the > primary reason for my veto. My intentions were indeed to have a vote about this, and the small portion of tracking that I rolled out was never intended as more than a small one-day test to see if we could get it set up and working, since there seemed, at the time, to be no objections on doing it. I'm sorry if this seemed rash, and I have reverted it back to what is was before. One has to learn how to walk the line between voting on issues or just doing it, and I completely acknowledge your reasons for the -1 - lesson learned :)
Since I still feel that this is something we could benefit from, I will report my message to docs@ below, so the dev@ people can have a look as well: I've been wondering for some time now, how we can improve the site to give the users a better experience and a faster flow from question to answer. In that search, the question of doing a proper facts-based analysis keeps popping up. What I would essentially like is to be able to look at the flow that happens from when a users has a problem till he/she finds a solution in our documentation (or on our IRC channel or mailing list). We should, as documentation writers, have some idea of whether our efforts are fruitful or not, and whether we can improve pages A, B or C to make it easier for users to search for an answer and find it, but without some form of log files or analytics tool, this becomes quite hard, if not impossible. I would therefore like to propose that we implement some form of anonymous analysis snippet on our documentation, so that we can figure out some facts: - What are users generally searching for when they wind up on our pages? - Which flow of content occurs when a user browses through the docs, looking for answers to problem A, B or C? Do they go through the guide as we intended for them to do, or do they pick a different path, and if so, why? - What are people generally reading about? Which pages are the most popular, and which are almost never touched (and does this reflect our own ideas of which pages are the most useful in various scenarios)? I believe that if we had these facts sorted out, we could more easily work towards improving our documentation and help people reach the answers to their questions faster. I'm looking forward to suggestions, comments and critique as always Also, if people know of some good ways to accomplish this, specifically which tools we could use, I'd appreciate some insight into that as well. -------------------------- With regards, Daniel.
