Hi,

Oops. I meant "counting unique users just like we do with directory fetches". The argument given was that most users are already behind NAT and hence counting unique IP addrs would not be accurate anyway. It was suggested that we count per connection country statistics (that is, total number of connections coming from a country) and divide that by average number of connections a user makes, to arrive at estimated number of unique users. I cannot find where I got to know this. Maybe on IRC, but I don't have logs of an year ago.

Also, the Metrics team has(?) to come up with a proposal on this IIRC. Until then it would not be considered a valid project?

Karsten would have something to say on this.

cc: karsten

On Fri, Feb 2, 2018 at 4:33 PM, George Kadianakis <desnacked@riseup.net> wrote:
Jaskaran Singh <jvsg1303@gmail.com> writes:

> [ text/plain ]
> Hi,
>
> I thought the project idea had already been depreciated in favor of
> counting unique users by directory fetches. No?
>

Yes, we do count unique users by directory fetches for the "active Tor
users" metric: https://metrics.torproject.org/userstats-relay-country.html

But we also use in-memory data structures tracking IP addresses to count
unique users per-country: https://metrics.torproject.org/userstats-bridge-combined.html?start=2017-11-04&end=2018-02-02&country=dz

I was not aware that we are planning to deprecate the latter in favor of
counting directory fetches. Did you get that from somewhere? Perhaps it
could make sense, not sure.

Cheers!