How do you handle guest tracking?

[mmosel]

What is your method for tracking guests and returning guests?

I'm working on a system where I will set a unique cookie for each guest (or try to). I'm trying to decide if generating a random string is sufficient or if I should use an auto-increment value. If I use the random string, there there is the ever so slight possibility of a duplicate. If I use an auto-increment, then I'm going to have so many non-used numbers it's not even funny (because every time there's a new hit to the home page I would attempt to insert a cookie, which would be an auto increment value).

So, how do you or how would you handle this?

[BillyBoB]

http://www.phpfreaks.com/tutorials/62/0.php

that starts but there are tutorials on

http://www.phpfreaks.com/tutorials.php

[mmosel]

Thanks, but that's a tutorial for who's online. I am building a deeper tracking system that will track return visitors - and using the IP address is not smart for this.

[BillyBoB]

in the tutorials is a way to do the unique thing  too

[king arthur]

I store the timestamp of the exact time they first visited along with a random number, this pretty much guarantees a unique number. Beware that some people do not accept cookies and then you need to look at other things to identify them such as IP address, user agent, etc.

[mmosel]

Yeah, thanks for that mr. King. :) I was going to go for the random number, but I decided on auto-increment. I already have a full page_logs table, with ip, user_agent, referer, page, etc. But I want to track repeat visits by guests, and then members who aren't logged in, and then of course while they are logged in. I record raw data, and then run a cron job to filter out bots in the auto-increment table. I'm still working out how I'll process some of the data, but that's another story.