Bad Site Meter

Friday, 6:24 pm

By Kate

Feb

01

2008

When I checked in on the blog this afternoon, the page loaded so slowly that it was painful. I watched all the little link addresses loading on the web browser’s status bar and noted one that said dg.specificclick.net. Wait a second. I don’t have anything to do with specificclick. Why is that loading on my web pages?

I went into my Firefox options and removed the specificclick cookies. I reloaded my web page and it showed up again. In the Firefox Options area, the cookies were back. Several of them. I then blocked the cookies and my web page loaded fast and cleanly. But that only works for my computer. If you have noticed the same thing happening on my or other sites, you need to permanently block the specificclick cookies. It’ll make many web pages load a lot faster and stop your browsing from being tracked by this...disease.

The question remained, though, where did that cookie come from? Off to do a little Googling about it.

What I learned…

Info from WordPress
Info from AskShane.org (referred by WordPress)
Things you should know before using sitemeter - Michael Sync

Site Meter has apparently made the brilliant business decision to insert a specificclick cookie into websites that use Site Meter (through the coding). Without our knowledge. Without our consent. Without options offered. This has put website owners into the position of being somewhat viral. If we use the Site Meter stats service on our website, we have (recently) unknowingly passed along a tracking cookie to all our visitors. That’s what....like thousand and thousands and thousands of websites and hundreds of thousands of website visitors? Scuse me, but that’s just wrong. And it slows our web sites down to a crawl at times in the bargain. Site Meter has attempted to explain this all as being a super duper method of providing their clients with better service. They apparently don’t understand that when you mess with people’s websites, it makes a lot of them really pissed off. Besides the stink of the ethics involved.

Anyway, just to make sure, I unblocked the specificclick cookies and removed the Site Meter coding. No problems, no cookies. And my blog loaded very quickly. I put the Site Meter coding back and the page loaded slowly and the cookies were back. Removed the cookies and the Site Meter coding and all was well again. Crap.

I liked Site Meter. I really did. They have very useful stats. But I have removed their code from my web site. Trust broken. Screw ‘em. I can live without them. My web site was not designed to provide free marketing stats to some one else or provide income to someone else (most especially without my knowledge or consent) or spread lousy rotten tracking cookies to my friends and acquaintances or anyone else.