README

Real visitor numbers for your Flarum forum. No cookies, no cookie pop-up, no bots.

You want to know if people visit your Flarum forum. But Google Analytics uses cookies, so in many countries you must show a cookie pop-up first (the box that asks visitors to say yes to cookies). Many people click no, so they never show up in your numbers. Bots add fake visits on top.

This extension adds the Privatus Analytics script to every page of your forum. You paste your site id once in the admin panel. Logged-in admins are not counted, unless you turn that off. The script sets no cookies and keeps no IP addresses. Bots are filtered out before they are counted.

So you see how many real people came, which pages they looked at and where they came from, on one simple dashboard. A report comes to your inbox each week, and you can set alerts for when traffic jumps or drops. And you don't need a cookie pop-up for your analytics.

Free plan, no card: 10,000 events a month (an event is a page view or an action you track) on up to 3 sites. Start free at privatusanalytics.com.

No cookies. No cookies and no hidden IDs on your visitors' devices, and no IP addresses are kept. Laws differ by country, so check your own legal advice.
Real people, not bots. Known bots, data centers and spam visits are left out on every plan.
Small and fast. The script is about 3 KB when compressed.

Requirements

Flarum 1.8 (flarum/core ^1.8).
A Privatus Analytics site id. It starts with pa_. You find it in Privatus Analytics under Site settings, Tracking.

Install

In your forum folder, run:

composer require privatus/flarum-privatus-analytics
php flarum cache:clear

Then open your admin panel, find Privatus Analytics under Features and switch it on.

Set it up

On the extension's page in the admin panel:

Setting	What it does
Site id	Your Privatus Analytics site id, like `pa_7Q2K9XH3AB`. Leave it empty to turn tracking off.
Do not count admins	On by default. Forum admins who are logged in do not get the script, so your own visits stay out of your reports.

Click Save Changes. Every forum page now has this in its <head>:

<script defer src="https://privatusstats.com/js/pa.js" data-site="pa_7Q2K9XH3AB"></script>

Flarum changes pages without a full reload. The tracker sees those page changes by itself, so every discussion you open is counted.

The admin panel never gets the script. A site id that does not look like pa_ followed by letters and digits prints nothing.

Update

composer update privatus/flarum-privatus-analytics
php flarum cache:clear

Remove

Switch the extension off in the admin panel, then run:

composer remove privatus/flarum-privatus-analytics

Privacy

The extension only adds a script tag. Your visitors' browsers send the page views to Privatus Analytics. Your forum server sends nothing. The script sets no cookies and stores nothing in the browser. See the privacy documentation for what is collected.

If you have a privacy policy, it should say which tools handle your visitors' data. You can paste this:

This website uses Privatus Analytics to count visits. It does not use cookies and does not follow you from one website to another. Your IP address is used for a moment to count visits and is never stored.

More options

The tracker has more options, like extra modules, paths to leave out and page masks. They are explained in the script attributes reference. This extension keeps things simple and prints the standard script only.

Development

The JavaScript lives in js/src and is built into js/dist, which is committed, as Flarum expects:

cd js
npm ci
npm run build

test/ holds a throwaway Flarum 1.8 forum in Docker for trying the extension:

cd test
docker compose -p patestflarum up -d --build
# open http://localhost:8089, log in as admin / testpassword123
docker compose -p patestflarum down -v

Contributing

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome at https://github.com/Privatus-Analytics/flarum.

License

MIT. See LICENSE. Privatus Analytics is a product of Two Phase LLC, Wyoming, USA.

privatus / flarum-privatus-analytics

Package info

Security

Statistics