IPv6 support is now live!
Yes, this is extremely overdue, but we are very happy to have it available now. 17 years of technical debt, where it was assumed that every IP address was an IPv4 address, combined with a gigantic codebase, made this much more challenging than you would ever expect.
For reasons such as privacy, storage size, and avoiding a massive database schema update, we’re only saving the last 32-bits of IPv6 addresses – even if you have privacy disabled in your settings. There’s a lot more info here about how we handle IPv6, if you care about the technical details.
Here is what it looks like in your visitor log:
There are two things worth noting that may cause confusion:
- If your website does not support IPv6, you will still have visitors on IPv6 that may connect to your site with IPv4, but then connect to our tracking servers with IPv6. This will result in the IP we log being completely different than what you may have in your own log files.
- The second half of most IPv6 addresses will change every 24 hours due to IPv6 privacy extensions, so we they’re not supported with the IP tags and filters feature. But as VPN-ish services like iCloud Private Relay have started becoming very mainstream, IP tags have been declining in usefulness for a while now.
In related news…
We’ve recently been talking about our upcoming anti-adblock reverse proxy tracking feature on Twitter. Once we started testing the proxy on production sites, it was quickly apparent that it didn’t play nice with IPv6, because we could no longer control how a visitor connected to our servers. Any site that had IPv6 support, that’s how the visitor would connect to that site. We only had IPv4 records in our DNS, so when the proxy forwarded the beacon to us, it would connect to us via IPv4, but, the proxy was only aware of that visitor’s IPv6 address, so that’s the IP it would forward. But, since we didn’t support IPv6, it was a broken mess. All that made IPv6 support a requirement, so here we are.
So, coming VERY soon… drum roll… our new anti-adblock proxy tracking feature! 🥳
There’s a preview here in our knowledgebase that we uploaded when we started testing it, because we thought it’d be out within a few days… 🤷🏻♂️
