I tried searching but didn't find anything that I thought was exactly what I'm looking for so in short, Im sorry if this is a re post.
I am currently looking for some kind of ID or GUID type ID that would identify a users machine or the user or something similar that every time (without logging in to any login system) they can get an id that is directly related to them. That may not make sense so read on...
Basically I want them to get the same id every time they hit a page for a kind of analytic portion of an app im writing. I have access to server side scripting, quickest and easiest for me is PHP and I've been looking into that as well, but cant seem to find a way to make that unique ID repeatable.
I don't really want to rely on cookies and thats why I want to try to make this repeatable id, and I know its a long shot, but is there something in a tech that I might not know so well (maybe flash or something) that will be able to get an id over and over for that machine/user/mac address each time they visit the page?
I will also be storing a typical GUID for the session (thats done already), but the hard part is Id like the other ID to be somehow related to the USER, PC, MAC, etc.
TLDR: Does anyone have any ideas on how I can get a repeatable identifier (same string when visited by the same machine or user every time they hit the page)? Is there a technology that I may not have thought of that might be able to do this that is mostly cross browser that can do this, I think I've run out of java script options, maybe something like flash or HTML5 (though I would like it to be pretty cross browser accessible) or maybe even some kind of API or service?
Is there a bunch of fields that would somewhat reliably be able to be concatenated and encoded, even if its not 100% foolproof? Can flash or some other tech grab anything unique to the machine or something? Is there any other somewhat non standard tech that might be able to do this, like action script or VBScript (though I dont even know if that still works lol) or something along those lines?
Thanks a lot and sorry if I didnt come across clear or the post is too long :)