We’re looking for some ways to keep as much analytics data as we can without either breaking the new eu law or annoying users (we really cant see “can we store cookies please?” popups taking off any time soon), so wondering if piwik can be used without any cookies at all.
I understand that the data wont be good, unique visitors will be invalid etc, but it seems like this will probably still be better than “plain” log analysis (the existing log analysis software that we’ve found are mostly not updated for a long time and produce quite ugly reports - suggestions welcome though!)
Has anyone done something similar to this? Any suggestions/tips etc very gratefully accepted!
regarding hints to do this:
Take a look at Visit#recognizeTheVisitor, you mentioned side effects, you probably won’t even loose much of the unique visitor information, Piwik uses the IP and browser settings to determine a unique visitor in case a cookie does not exist.
regarding the law:
The jury on the “cookie law” is probably still out, AFAIK the current consensus here in Germany is that normal site specific cookies are OK and either advertising or flash cookies are at most a problem. But since the deadline for the implementation of the law is in a few days and no country has passed legislation, I doubt anybody will press this issue on any level.