Another small enhancement allows designated users to be excluded from the reports, or omitted from the database itself. How you use these features is, of course, between you and your conscience ...
User objects now have two new options, both of which can be accessed via the Surftrackr admin interface:
Exclude from database
When data is imported into Surftrackr's database from your logfiles, any users with this flag set will not have their web history imported.
There's a slight "gotcha" with this, since user objects are automatically created when they are found for the first time in the log. Hence, even a user you want to exclude will be imported first time they are encountered. To exclude them from subsequent imports, go to the user object in the admin interface, set this flag to "true", and (if you feel like it) delete the associated web history.
That could get tedious, so a preferred solution would be to create users manually using the admin interface, prior to importing the logs where the user will be encountered. Usernames are either (a) the authenticated name, such as "dave" or "srw425", or (b) in situations where your proxy does not authenticate, the IP address of the workstation, so a user on 192.168.1.120 will become "192.168.1.120_user" (without quotation marks).
When you create the user, you might want to associate the user object with a workstation, in which case you have to create a workstation object as well. Just click on the green + sign next to the Workstation section to do that. It's not essential, since Surftrackr will make this association itself when data is imported.
Exclude from reports
Set this option if you want user data to be included in the database, but not shown on reports. There might be occasions where your policies or legal framework require you to keep all log data, regardless of whether or not you want to analyse it. This option is here to help with those situations.
There is a slight bug which I don't have time to fix yet: on the list of websites, a website will be shown even if the user who visited it is excluded from reports. When you click on that website, however, the user will not be shown. If you have only one excluded user, this could be a bit of a give-away, but it's slightly awkward to solve, so I'm going to leave it for now.
Another thing to be aware of is this: setting "exclude_from_database" to "true" for a user does not remove old data for that user; it will still be in the database and could be shown on reports. So, if you import some data for a user, then change your mind and set "exclude_from_database", you should also set "exclude_from_reports" or delete the user's data.
Note that "exclude_from_reports" also applies to the search feature I added yesterday.
Simon Burns
13 Feb 2008