Save users activity

I am a web developer and I want to design a commercial website to sell a customer's product. Sell and buy activities are important and I need to maintain user activity information to keep the site secure.

I want to write a dynamic website. I开发者_如何学JAVA want to control all user activity and then decide whether to save user activity information in a database. Some of site's visitors are registered users and some are anonymous. I want to save online information such as ip address, username, page name, and date/time for my registered users.

I want to know:

• How do I save a user's IP address?
• What more do I need to save?

Saving each HTTP request details into database will work for low traffic web sites, but you will have performance issues in case of popular website, since writing to database in relatively slow operation.

Why not to use server HTTP logs instead?

All HTTP web servers create plain text log files which record remote user IP address, URL requested, etc. You can create activity report by writing your own script or using log file report tools. AWStats ( http://awstats.sourceforge.net/ ) is one of the most popular open-source tools for this.

On client side you can use Google Analytics to track user activity. It also provides means to track custom events:

_gaq.push(['_trackEvent', 'login', 'user_login', "custom data"]);

More info at: http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/tracking/asyncUsageGuide.html

This option only tracks users with JavaScript enabled, so it won't show bots, crawlers or users having analytics blocking addons installed.

I'm not sure I understand all of your question...but to address at least one aspect of it, if the user is behind a proxy, then you have no way of determining what their real IP is. That's the whole point. The proxy is the one making the request and then forwarding it. Without asking the proxy yourself, you cannot determine that. With regards to what else you need to save, it depends entirely on what you want to do and you haven't done a good job of explaining why you are saving this data. If you can clarify that, perhaps we can help you a bit more in determining what data you should be saving.

Edit To address your clarification, if you wanted to be crazy, you could log everything that a person does. Every link they click, every product they view, etc. I don't necessarily advocate that as I find it a bit creepy, but there are definitely sites that do it. At the bare minimum, I would suggest logging what products people look at and then what products they buy. I would also log that information on a per-session basis. Basically, what products do people look at and then end up buying on the same trip to your store. I wouldn't worry too much about the "real" IP address. Most people won't be behind a proxy and those that are, you can't do anything about anyway.

How do I save a user's IP address?

$_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']

What more do I need to save?

That's quite strange question. It's your application, not someone's else. How can we guess what information you need?

However, at least one issue I can point out: a page name is not sufficient to log "all user activity". Query string and POST data usually contains important details on that activity.