laws and the use of logging IPs

in the light of recent court-decisions in germany ( german article ) which essentially disallows logging of IPs I’m wondering what one would really need it for?

I’m using IP-logging/-tracking in multiple ways:
1. statistics about visits and recurring users
2. storing it with forum-posts to allow law enforcement in case some user really goes over the line
3. tracking requests in a given time by IP to automatically block potential attacks

So what of that could be avoided?

For 1. , one could just ignore logging the ip but trying to count visits and recurring users would be impossible with that. What now? Maybe logging a md5/shaX of the ip to have some unique key per IP? Wouldn’t that still fall under the rule from the court as you could find out which was the actual IP?
Counting visits is an important tool for getting advertisers to advertise at a page (In my opinion). Any ideas?

For 2. , guess one could disable that but would I be responsible then for each and every forum-post because the real poster can’t be retrieved? (Yeah, laws in german are bad for the one offering the forum after all 😦 )
On the other hand there is the upcoming data retention ( german news collection about this topic ) which is planned for keeping all records for 6 months (!!!). So for now I should remove all tracking of ip-addresses just to be forced to store it for 6 months a while later?

For 3. , this behaviour gives me another problem too. Trying to load-balance over multiple webservers usually goes through a reverse proxy in front of the webservers which would always give the REMOTE_ADDR of the reverse-proxy to the apps. So the reverse-proxy would need to add this security layer. But I really failed to find one doing this up to know.
But is that really needed and I’m just oversensitive in this area? Do I need to accept any number of requests/s from any user?

Are there other use-cases for logging IPs?

How are other users handling this?

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