How to distribute exclude visit cookies?

General questions
1

I can set a cookie in order to prevent that my own visits are excluded from stats.
I tried to use the “exclude cookie activate” link into another browser that is not logged in to piwik, and the response is: “You must be logged in to access this functionality”.

Can I provide any cookie to other (simple) users which would result in not counting their visits? It is my goal to have “the” team not contribute to visit statistics. Such seems the only viable way to obtain a “honest” stats that mainly represents visits from the public.

A generic access for team members would represent a workaround, but I’d prefer the simplicity of simple links that I can hand over.

2

Hi RJM,

I do exactly as you do, the link I send them can be found on the Settings -> Privacy and at the very bottom is “Piwik opt-out for your visitors” grab the URL from the iFrame. it will look like this http://PIWIK.EXAMPLE.COM/index.php?module=CoreAdminHome&action=optOut&language=en

I email that link to all my clients and have it set in every one of my browsers.

I also split the DoNotTrack plugin into two, a DoNotTrackCookie and DoNotTrackHeader so I can “not respect” the browsers do not track header, but still ignore the cookie.

Hope this helps,
Chad

3

here is my split plugin DoNotTrack split into Header & Cookie · Issue #4238 · matomo-org/matomo · GitHub

4

The solution outlined above, involving distributing a link, so individual users can generate their own exclude cookie will not work for my current security setup because public access is restricted to only the piwik.js & piwik.php files required for the tracking mechanism.

I was hopeful when I saw the subject line that there might be a way to literally distribute a pre-generated cookie to other users. Anyone know if that would work?

Hang on… I’ll do some testing…

5

In Firefox, at any rate, cannot distribute physical cookie files as they are not stored as separate files. Firefox stores them in a binary sqlite db.

So I think the better question is: Is there a way to generate an exclude-from-tracking cookie that does not involve granting public access on index.php?