If I've understood you correctly, your suggestion is that, to make logging easier, we should adopt a convention of how we call certain web resources.
I can't imagine that you will ever be able to get all the programmers to agree not to use URLs that way. It's not like we can mark the URL as being dangerous somehow. As long as the URL works, they'll want to use it... and really, why shouldn't they?
Is there some other way we could achieve those objectives? Are there other patterns that already exist that we could use to notice when it's not a full page request?
On 10/19/10 1:15 PM, Rob Lanphier wrote:
Hi all,
In diving into a problem with logging[1], we discovered that we were unintentionally treating several special page accesses (in this case, containing included Javascript) as normal pageviews, thus throwing our pageview statistics way off. The proposed solution involves changing the way we access those Javascript requests from this form: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:BannerController
...to this form: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:BannerController
I'm assuming this convention isn't documented anywhere (other than earlier today on the wikitech wiki[2]). Before we run off and document this as something code reviewers need to look out for, I'd like to make sure this is really how we'd like to make the distinction.
Is this a sensible convention, or is there a different convention we should implement? Note that any changes to the convention would need to be implemented here: http://svn.wikimedia.org/viewvc/mediawiki/trunk/webstatscollector/filter.c?v...
...so futzing with the convention isn't free, but *may* be worth it if we have arrive at a vastly superior convention.
Rob [1] https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=25564 [2] http://wikitech.wikimedia.org/view/Squid_logging#Inflated_Stats
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