How to track user activity on a website without requiring login

cookiesip addressyelp.com

I was just searching for a review on Yelp and I saw these (Useful, Funny, Cool) evaluation tags for a review. I was able to mark them even when I was not logged in, still they would retain the way I marked them even if I open a new browser window, or a private browsing session.

How is this done? I mean how does it track user activity without requiring me to login/signup?
I don't know if its cookies or the site stores my IP address or a combination of both?

Best Answer

Storing this in cookies/session is the way to go. In PHP you can just use the $_SESSION functionality to do this. More info on that here.

This will not work if the user opens a private browsing session, though. IP tracking would work, but IP addresses change due to ISP assignments and may represent different users (for example, two users in one home sharing the same DSL connection). For these reasons this is not recommended.

Related Solutions

LastPass – How to Make LastPass Login to Yelp Automatically

Go to your LastPass Vault, Then to Settings > Equivalent Domains. You want to make sure the Yelp Domains you use, are considered equivalent.

This is what I added:

yelp.com, yelp.be, yelp.ca

Apply the changes in the Settings, (requires Lastpass Master Password verification)

As for Auto Login, that only works if there is a form to AutoFill. So unless you visit the /login page first you won't auto login. You could easily login automatically by just clicking the login button.

Go straight to the login page if you want to auto login, after logon it should send you to the homepage anyway.

Youtube – How to get YouTube comments working in Firefox without 3rd party cookies enabled and wihout enable cookies for google.com

The four exceptions I use are...

google.com
plus.google.com
apis.google.com
plus.googleapis.com

Just be sure, though, that if you run any type of browser cleaners (or cleaners that can clean out browser info as well as other stuff), disable the cleaner from cleaning site preferences; which is what these exceptions are. Otherwise, you'll have to add them again.