Also accessible to administrators under the System Setup menu, NeatClubs provides logs and website traffic summary. Selecting this option results in the additional seven sub-options shown below.
Traffic Graphics
An open-source tool called Webalizer provides graphical views that give insight into how frequently your site is being visited (and by whom).
A full description of Webalizer is beyond the scope of this document. Additional information can be found at http://www.mrunix.net/webalizer/.
Webalizer is provided automatically for all NeatClubs instances that are provisioned on their own domain name. For technical reasons the Traffic Analysis function is not available for sites configured on sub domains.
System Log
Often organizations will have multiple administrators changing content on a website. Also, busy sites may be taking large numbers of on-line registrations. The system event log is designed to show incidents of significance. Rather than showing every single web-site visit, the System Log captures items such as user-logins, changes to documents, photo uploads and any on-line registration activity that may be of interest.
Every visit is given a unique identifier (ID) as shown below. This provides us with a mechanism to review and audit past activity on the system.
Page View Counter
The Page View Counter provides a more accurate counter of page views than simple (and misleading) measures such as "hits".
Every time a page is viewed, NeatClubs increments a counter and keeps the stored value in the database as shown below. This is reasonably accurate since "bots" cannot invoke the NeatClubs menu options(since they are Javascript based and require mouse movement and mouse click events). This means that that views are more likely to be the result of page views from real web-site visitors.
Recent Visits
NeatClubs logs the IP address of every web-site visitor (until this information is purged). Having the IP address of visitors is useful if you suspect malicious activity on the site. This is because the IP address usually identifies a particular internet subscriber.
If a person is logged in, their identity is known and will be shown here. If a user did not log in, this means they are "anonymous" and their identity cannot be readily determined.
Visits by address
The view below shows the number of distinct web-site visits (not hits) segmented by originating IP address. A larger number of hits from a foreign IP address can be a sign of malicious activity.
Simple Graph
While PLESK does a better job at presenting graphics, NeatClubs incorporates its own traffic metrics.
These metrics are more accurate because they measure distinct visits to the site home page and do not include "hits" that arise as a result of users subsequently navigating to other pages on the site.
IPN log
IPN refers to PayPal instant payment notification. When a payment occurs on your web-site, PayPal will automatically place a call to the web-site (asynchronous to any user activity) to advise the web-site of the state of the payment transaction. NeatClubs uses both IPN and PayPal PDT to elicit as much information from PayPal about payment status as possible. The IPN log provides a detailed account of all interactions with PayPal to help troubleshoot payment or registration problems. Additional information about setting up a PayPal Merchant Account can be found here.
