5.3, 5.4 Tracker

The WoltLab Suite and applications based on it already monitor many users' actions; see for example the Recent Activities. But there are still many user and especially moderative actions in your community largely unrecognized. Tracker also monitors such actions and helps you to win a more detailed insight into the behavior of selected users.

Description

This plugin adds community a monitoring function (tracker) for a variety of user actions. These range from changing the avatar over uploading attachments and page views up to the withdrawal of likes. When tracking a user the user's privacy is protected at all times. Thus, for example, although newly created conversations are recognized, the contents of the conversations, however, remain hidden. The same applies to changes of profile data.

The tracking can be individually configured for each user. By the means of typical bulk processing functions, however, multiple user trackers can be set up and edited in parallel. Especially when the tracking of pageviews is enabled, a lot of data will be created in very short time. Thus, the monitoring requires significant resources and will put a noticeable load on the system - the more monitored user, the more load.

Actions tracked within possibilities of the system:

• Users: blocking, following, login, reports, infractions
• Account: changing username, email and password, deleting the account
• User profile: editing avatar, user title, signature and other profile settings
• Content: attachments, comments, conversations, likes, tags, polls
• Other: moderation, page views

Actions are usually stored with the performing user, time, used IP address, used browser, typing, description and link to the content of the action. This data can be exported for a spreadsheet into a CSV file as needed. Permanently deleted text content (for example comments) are stored unformatted, to have them available for later examination.

Limitations

Due to the system limitations and to safeguard the privacy of the user compromises have to be made in some tracking functions. Thus, not all visited pages among others are clearly identified, many profile / account actions are linked only with the user profile or there cannot always be (exact) links to the affected content. Moreover, user rights, which might limit content visibility, may be ignored on links.

Actions, of which a user is passively affected (for example, blocking, message, receiving likes), are not tracked. Similarly, actions in the ACP are not monitored.

Expandability

The tracker can, without additional costs, be extended by optional packages for all WoltLab applications and other plugins. Extensions for WoltLab applications are included in this package.

Configuration

The following configuration options and ACP-functions are available:

• Activation of the plugin modules,
• Default options for automatic or cleanup functions and IP Whois queries,
• Setting the moderative user permissions for configuring and viewing tracker entries and blocking the tracking,
• Bulk processing of trackers and tracker entries.

Notes on Data Protection

• After creating a user tracker, this extension stores in detail the history of a user's visit to the website, including the IP address in the database (tables wcf1_user_tracker and wcf1_user_tracker_log). Deleting a user or tracker preserves most of the data in the database (wcf1_user_tracker_log table), deleting only user IDs. To delete all user data, delete the corresponding tracker entries in the wcf1_user_tracker_log table.
• Uninstalling the extension will erase all stored data.