signalLobsters2026-09-21
Bot-free self-hosted analytics with GoatCounter on NixOS
The author replaced Google Analytics with self-hosted GoatCounter (single binary + SQLite, privacy-friendly session IDs valid 8 hours) on NixOS, after AI scrapers inflated GoAccess log stats to ~2,000 daily visitors versus GoatCounter's ~200 real humans. To filter bots, he swapped GoatCounter's 2,189-byte JS client for a custom ~150-byte fetch-based hit tracker requiring user interaction (touchmove/mousemove/keydown/pointerdown events), plus a CSS `:hover` border-image fallback for the ~2% no-JS visitors. Reliability comes from a local proxy on each of the 5 web servers that buffers hits in memory for several days and batches them to the central GoatCounter instance.
- topic
- AI Industry Impact
- source
- Lobsters
#GoatCounter#NixOS
score
score 8 out of 10. 0-10: how dense the facts are, multiplied by how much you can do with them after reading. 8+ means the topic's evidence bar is met: benchmarks and availability for a new model, amount and investors for a funding round, revenue figures for a solo-money story. Below 5 an item does not enter the digest. A press release scores 3 or less, a reprint loses 2, anything older than 14 days loses 1, a headline that misleads loses 3.
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