[Summary-Talk] Incremental config lockdown

[Richard McLean <richard@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi All,


We're just getting started working with Summary, and for the most
part it's going very well, excellent product and the results it produces
are very helpful.

My only real problem, and I know I'm not the first looking through
the archives, is with the almost total lockdown of the configuration
when using Incremental processing. I understand the whys, but
would like to ask for some flexibility here, even at the cost of
slower processing or greater memory use. We have no want to
store a terabyte or more of log files for the year, or to have the
server need to reprocess them in full every time the stats are
regenerated (and it's a waste of server resources).

Looking at the situation in the actual use of 100 domains - goals
change, variables to track change, extra domain aliases are
added and removed from domains, development and client IP
addresses to discount from the figures change. That to use
incremental mode we need to either lose all of the existing stats
for a subreport (which could be for a year or more) to make a
simple change to add a URL to track, or add an IP to ignore seems
to me to be extreme.

Is it possible to get some of the settings unlocked in incremental
mode? Give the users the option whether to trade processing
speed or flexibility rather than forcing them to do things one way?

5 years ago, the situation with domain hosting was much simpler,
and the above goals and tradeoffs made sense, but given changing
SEO techniques, multiple domains per site with different goals,
changing goals with different campaigns, and different needs for
tracking on a site by site basis, is the rigid system that Summary
currently has workable for a large number of domains?

The documentation suggests to setup everything exactly how you
need it before turning on incremental processing, but how can you
do that when you don't know what the exact needs are going to
be for the next 95 domains you add.

What about being able to set whether a report is incremental or
not on the sub-report level?

I'd love to here the thoughts of both users and the developers on
this one. Is this something that can change?


cheers,
Richard
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