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How to determine uniqueness of clients from http requests?

I notice that when HTTP requests are made from clients through a proxy server then the IP address of the requests always refers to the proxy server. Therefore, if many clients from a huge corporation with a proxy server access the website, I cannot tell if the requests are unique clients or not. Is there a way to determine the uniqueness of clients if the HTTP requests are through a proxy server? I know the mac address is not included in the HTTP request, so I just made a decision about it.

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The easiest way is to set a cookie for the response and check it in the request. If it's there, then you've seen this client before (and you could include some identification in the cookie). Of course, this depends on which clients are cookies and the user has not disabled cookies (or cleared them manually).



There is also a problem with some clients that might be useful for cookies, but will effectively start from scratch every time - for example, if someone runs a program to clean up your site, it will probably start with fresh jars of cookies every time. no matter how you set the cookie.

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Provide a cookie to every new user with a GUID . You can track this and even include the GUID in your server logs.



We do this through our public web server to track "unique paths" through our site.

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