README

Forum analytics for Flarum — captured server-side, with zero JavaScript, no cookies, and no external tracker. Your analytics history lives in your own database and stays there.

How it works

The extension records events (page and discussion views, searches, posts, registrations) on the server as requests happen. Visitors are counted with a daily-rotating salted hash — no IP address is ever stored, no cookie is ever set, and nothing runs in your visitors' browsers.

Events sit in a short-lived local buffer (72 hours max). Once a day, the buffer is rolled up into small per-day aggregate rows in your database — that's the permanent history, a few kilobytes per month.

Without a license key, rollups are computed locally and include basic daily counts: pageviews, visitors, posts, registrations. Nothing ever leaves your server.
With a Birdseye subscription, the daily batch is sent to our processor, which computes the full picture — bounce rate, session length, top pages and discussions, referrer sources, devices, countries (world map included) — and returns the results to be stored in your database. We keep nothing. Cancel anytime; every stat you've collected stays with you.

Beyond the numbers

Forum health, not just traffic — new-member activation (who posts within their first week), discussions that get read but never answered, top tags, live search terms, and a "today so far" strip straight from the buffer.
Share the dashboard — a View forum analytics permission lets any group you choose open the dashboard from their user menu, without admin access. Nobody holds it until you grant it.
Weekly digest — every Monday, administrators get a plain-text email summary of last week vs the week before. One switch to turn off.

Installation

composer require linkrobins/birdseye

Enable it in the admin panel. That's it — stats begin collecting immediately.

Requirements

Flarum ^2.0, PHP ^8.3
The scheduler must be running for daily rollups (php flarum schedule:run via cron).

Privacy notes

Visitor identity is hash(secret + date + IP + user agent), truncated; the salt rotates daily so visitors cannot be tracked across days.
Country detection uses your proxy's country header (e.g. Cloudflare) when available. Otherwise, an anonymized IP prefix (/24 for IPv4, /48 for IPv6 — never the full address) is kept in the 72-hour buffer solely for country lookup during processing, then discarded. This can be disabled in settings, and no full IP is written to disk either way.
Bounce rate and visit duration are measured log-style (server-side), which runs slightly conservative compared to script-based trackers — the cost of shipping no JavaScript at all.

linkrobins / birdseye

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