Changelog archive: 2020

Improvements:

• Improved query performance for top referrers.

• Improved query performance for top pages.

• Improved query performance for domain total stats.

• Improved query performance for bounce rate graph.

Bug fixes:

• Fixed some graphs not updating when changing domains from the top-left domain selector.

Performance improvements:

• Visitors list performance drastically improved for big databases.

• Top pages query performance increased by 5x.

• Filtering for exact page visited query performance increased by 2x.

• Drastically improved the performance of the visitors limit query (the one that deletes old users when limit is reached).

New:

• Time intervals for charts. You can now change the time intervals for timeline charts to be grouped by Hour, Day, Week or Month.

Improvements:

• Tags are now sorted by time instead of alphabetically, this means that you can now see the order in which events happened.

• UI: Month name is now displayed in short format in the date range picker (Sept. instead of September) for better space usage.

• UI: Reduced chart legend length below chart title (only shows segment name now). Detailed legend (chart title + segment name) is still displayed in the hover tooltip.

Bug fixes:

• sessionStorage is now used instead of localStorage to store user and session recording data. This should fix some issues when the user opens the site in multiple tabs (as sessionStorage is unique per tab but localStorage was shared.

New:

• Session length filter. You can now filter sessions with a specific sessions length.

Improvements:

• Improved dashboard loading speed by always caching the bundled CSS/JS. It's safe to always cache them as each new build has a hashed/distinct bundle filename.

• Drastically improved visitors list loading time, especially when using a larger page size (eg: 100 rows)

Bug fixes:

• Fix not being able to add more than two page filters

New:

• Summary stats. In the statistics page, for each segment it will now also be displayed: the total number of visitors, pageviews, average session length and average bounce rate.

Improvements:

• Referrer links act more like links now, meaning that you can middle or right click a referrer in the Top referrers or Visitors lists to open that page in a new tab.

Bug fixes:

• Fixed some translation issues for the German locale.

New:

• Anonymize IP. You can now choose to hash IPs before they are stored in the database for increased user privacy. The hash also includes the UserAgent string to avoid false positives. I strongly recommend using this feature.

• Filter by IP. You can now easily filter all sessions for a user based on IP (or hashed IP). Now that the IP can be anonymized, this allows you to see multiple visits of a single user without affecting a specific user's privacy.

Improvements:

• Updated the AB testing tracker code to be included. It now hides the page using opacity: 0 instead of visibility: hidden as it results in less content flashing in most browsers.

• Default settings: Hash user IP and Censor visible IP settings are enabled by default to increase user privacy.

• UX: Number of rows per page in visitors list is now cached in localStorage.

• UX: Page index currently being viewed in visitors list is now stored in the URL. This means that you can now refresh or use the browser back button and you will stay on the same page number.

• Performance: Improved visitors list loading performance (previously the list was requested multiple times, thus putting more stress on the server)

Bug fixes:

• Fixed some translation issues for the Dutch locale.

New:

• Wildcard referrer filter. You can now search for a referrer using a start or an end wildcard (similar to the pages search). This is very useful as you can now add *google.* as a segment's referrer filter, and it will match all international Google domains (eg. google.com, google.de, google.es, etc.)

• Translation: German language

Improvements:

• Improved tracking performance of a new user (removed one DB query).

Bug fixes:

• Fix heatmap points position: static positioning was not correctly storing the relative X values.

• Fix tracking error on some PHP versions, when notices are enabled (in createClient.php:70)

New:

• Dutch language

Improvements:

• Code: Translation files are not stored as JSON. You can help with translations here: https://github.com/userTrack/translations

• UI: Remove the domains thumbnail images. Read the reasons here: https://trello.com/c/Vvoo0ak5

• UI: admin is now shown as a placeholder in the login form (useful if you forgot the default username).

Bug fixes:

• Fix update .htaccess file not working on some server configurations.

New:

• Auto-updater on WordPress. The same auto-updater that was added in 3.2.0 for the standalone version is now also available in the WordPress version.

Bug fixes:

• Fixed an issue with A/B tests were the last previewed variant was used during playback instead of the A/B variants the user saw.

WordPress:

• Auto-updater was added (as mentioned above).

• You can now deselect all checkboxes in the Pages to track menu if you don't want the tracker file to be automatically included. Previously at least one checkbox had to be selected.

New:

• URL tracking opt-out. Users can opt out (or in) from being tracked by your userTrack instance by accessing any URL where your tracker is installed with the query parameter ust-opt-out or ust-opt-in.

  eg. site.com?ust-opt-out

Improvements:

• Slightly improved tracking performance and accuracy.

• For URL Favicons images use DuckDuckGo URL instead Google.

Bug fixes:

• Fix scroll playback offset sometimes not saving last scroll position.

Bug fixes:

• Always show errors while updating.

• Fix wrong upcoming version number shown in UI.

Bug fixes:

• Fix default relative tracking setting being false.

• Fix settings save not working.

New:

• Automatic updates. A notification will appear in the dashboard when a new userTrack update is ready. To update the installation go to Settings->Updates->Update now. A valid license key is required.

Important changes:

• Tracking settings are now stored in the database instead of the tracker.js file. This means that you can now safely replace/update the file without losing your personalized settings.

Bug fixes:

• Fix tracker throwing an error when a radio button or select was clicked.

WordPress version:

• This update is only available for the standalone version. The WordPress version will receive the automatic updates functionality soon.

New:

• Average session length chart. The previous "pages per session" bar chart has been hidden as it was hard to read.

Important changes:

• Tracker.js was updated to fix the session length issue, you will have to change on setting to regenerate the ust.min.js minified tracking code.

Improvements:

• Small UI/UX improvements for:

  • Sidebar UI

  • Domains list UI

  • A/B tests list UI

  • Tracking code modal

• A toggle has been added in the tracking code modal so you can choose to include or not the extra A/B tracking scripts.

• A warning is now shown saying that you will be logged out when you change your own user information

• Disabled caching of userTrack's index.html to make it easier to update to new versions

• Added a cache breaker query string ?v=3.1.0 to the included tracker script, to force clients to get the latest version.

• Improved tracking performance: reduced the initial number of requests done for each page visited from 3 to 2.

Security:

• A password must now be chosen at installation time for the admin user instead of using a default password. Note that there should always be a user named "admin".

Bug fixes:

• Fixed a bug where session length would be really long if a user comes back to the site. If you saw a session length of "20hours" it could have meant that the user left the site and then came back 20 hours later.

• You are now properly logged out after changing your password

• Page now correctly starts scrolled at the top when navigating to a different page in the dashboard

• Fixed errors flashing before being redirected to the login screen, if accessing the dashboard while not logged in.

WordPress version:

• userTrack will no longer be displayed in an iframe inside WordPress, but the dashboard will open in a new tab. This way there is a lot more space for the graphs/stats and it also fixes the issue with the iframe sizes not filling entire window.

New:

• A/B tests: you can now change text or inline styles on your page using just the userTrack interface. Users who see a specific version are automatically tagged with that A/B test variant so you can segment and view data for those users only.

• Dark mode: you can now switch between the dark and light themes of the userTrack UI.

Important changes:

• The tracker inclusion code was updated. There is some extra inline JavaScript before including the tracker file, in order to be able to track page load speed and make sure tags will be correctly saved, even if you call UST.addTag() before the script loads.

• The A/B test file can also be optionally included in order to enable A/B testing.

Improvements:

• You can now dismiss the info/error mesages shown in the dashboard. Their position was also moved to bottom center (was bottom left).

• You can now click the referrer URL either in the visitors list or the top referrers list and it will be added as a filter to the current active segment.

• You can now filter the referrer based on an exact URL (before you could only filter by domain name).

• Some alignment improvements for the visitors table.

• A small dot indicator is now shown on the first active segment if multiple segments are active.

• To help with installation troubleshooting, a server/troubleshoot.php file was added which, when accessed, checks some common userTrack installation errors and displays them.

• You can no longer add invalid domain names to tracked domains. This fixes the problem with the navigation when a a domain name was added that included a subdirectory path.

• Added info text with examples showcasing the wildcard feature for the pages filter input.

• Autocomplete dropdown options are now automatically shown, without having to type a letter first.

• Increased default users limit from 1k to 100k.

Bug fixes:

• Fixed an issue with event listeners callbacks not being called sometimes, which stopped some specific actions or tags from being recorded.

• Fixed a bug which stopped element hovering from working during playback. Now the elements hover should again be triggered when the cursor position is above an element.

• Fixed some events not beig replayed below the fold (if the page was scrolled).

• Fix a bug where removing all ignoredIP or all ignoreGET values from the settings would break the settings editor from working.

New:

• Live playback. When watching the playback of a visitor that is still on your site, new data will be automatically loaded and playback will only stop if 10 seconds pass without any user activity.

• Skip pauses in playback . The option to skip inactivity while watching a recording has been reimplemented.

• Page filters for segments. You can now add one or more pages to filter by in segments. The pages can have a starting/ending wildcard. For example, adding *blog* will only show users who visited a page whos URL contains the blog keyword. The same wildcard syntax works when filtering data in the Visitors table.

Bug fixes:

• A default date range (14 days) is now always enabled for segments. Without having a range selected, the comparison data from segments would not be aligned. You can no longer view data without a date range specified.

• Fixed pagination of visitors list when using segments (total number of pages was wrong).

• Fixed empty/incomplete visitor pages being shown in visitors list when the pages filter is used. The filter is now done in MySQL, but the page path has to be exact.

WordPress specific fixes:

• Fixed an issue where sometimes the userTrack tables would not be deleted when the userTrack plugin is uninstalled.

• Fixed a possible conflict with other plugins, if they someone included the MaxMind GeoIP DB automatically.

• Fixed an issue where saving settings would add magic slashes to the tracker.js file and break it.

New:

• Segments. You can now group multiple filters into segments. The graphs will show all segments at once and the visitors list, heatmaps and list statistics (top pages/top referrers) will show the data for the first active segment.

• Country filter. A new users filter has been added in order to select only users coming from a specific country.

Improvements:

• When adding a new domain name, the protocol (http) is automatically removed from the URL. Previously, adding a domain name with http in front would fail to show the data for that domain and also break the interface.

• A new UI modal system was implemented, so most prompts in the interface now use the MaterialUI design instead of the native, thread-blocking, prompt.

• The notification system that was showing error/success messages was replaced with notistack.

• Filters inputs now have an autocomplete feature (eg. when you add a new tag, you can suggestion based on the existing tags in the database for the current domain).

• Some performance improvements, especially when changing filters/segments. Only the graphs for the segments that were changed are now reloaded.

Bug fixes:

• Fixed: Pagination in visitors list - visitors list page would be wrong or the interface would crash when changing filters/segments while on a page other than first.

Security:

• The current database password is no longer shown during the initial database setup, to avoid a possible attack before the script is installed.