[Gllug] Linux users - sign petition to say you use BBC web site!

[damion.yates at gmail.com]

On Fri, 2 Nov 2007, Dan Kolb wrote:

> On Fri, Nov 02, 2007 at 01:38:29PM +0000, Alain Williams wrote:
> > Please sign, it takes a minute.
> 
> Yeees......so, head of technology looks into web logs, pulls out the
> recorded statistics to give numbers of people accessing the website:
> "We have 17.1 million users of bbc.co.uk in the UK, and, as far as
> our server logs can make out, 5 per cent of those [use Macs] and
> around 400 to 600 are Linux users". I can see why he clearly doesn't
> know what he's talking about....

I regularly grepped the logs for user agents (I was root at bbc.co.uk
from 1998 to 2006), as I took an interest in browser usage and UNIX
use (and Lynx use).

UNIX use dropped from about 4% to about 0.8% in that time (that
represents an increase in Linux users, just a lower proportion).

Unless there has been a massive drop in Linux users to the site in the
past year since I left, the initial figures are way off.  I also know
that the standard reporting tools were analog, grep, or a special tool
explicitly written to pull out user agent stats and group by OS (there
are SPARC Solaris IE and Opera users to count in the UNIX camp), it
sort of weighted against IE on Windows, by assuming, unknown = UNIX is
some cases ;)  It wasn't even written by our department, which was a
UNIX shop!

Netscape Navigator/Communicator vs IE was 60:40 when I started
it got to 1:99 before firefox usage grew back in the last year or two.

Damion

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Damion Yates - damion at google.com
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