Hitbox on LiveJournal

[kevink]

I want to address the questions and concerns we have heard from users about Hitbox code on LiveJournal. There are several points that have been raised and I'll try to touch on each one.

Comments

[rustnroses]

"but we just didn't take the time to spell it all out clearly." - that statement right there is the problem. Put simply, Kevin - You. Fucked. Up.

And while I appreciate the apology, there should not have been a need for one. And while I'd like to give you the benefit of the doubt concerning your intentions as being benign, your actions speak to either a complete disrespect of what LiveJournal is as a community, not to mention the people who work, help and volunteer on the site, or a short-sightedness that is...disconcerting (to steal from Malerin above) in a member of management.

Apologies are nice, and from a business and rational view most of us probably understand the desire for site tracking statistics...but you need to recognize that the way you pushed this live without informing the community just created a huge trust problem with your user base.

[flashfire]

Speak for yourself. It's not that big a deal to me.

Yippie, skip

[naraht]

Well, I for one...don't care. I trust LJ, and if LJ trusts HitBox, fine. From the explination above, it seems that everything is on the up & up, and I fail to see how stat tracking is going to bring about the end of the world.

You CAN disable cookies if you're paranoid. You CAN not post personal information on the internet if you feel that it may comprimise you. LJ isn't trying to steal your identity, or start up pop-under ads or anything. For years they've been saying how they are fine financially, and I haven't heard any diffrent, so I assume they still are. So relax, it's only a web-log community, not the spanish inquisition.

Re: Yippie, skip

[yankees133]

For years they've been saying how they are fine financially, and I haven't heard any diffrent, so I assume they still are

I thought that too, but I am actually starting to wonder.

Has anyone else noticed that the active user base is actually decreasing?

Re: Yippie, skip

[phoenixdreaming]

Has anyone else noticed that the active user base is actually decreasing?

No, I don't notice it decreasing.

Re: Yippie, skip

[yankees133]

It was over 2.6 million at one point, now it's around 2.55 million.

[joyeuxnoel]

You know, I applaud not putting Hitbox on individual journals and I probably didn't run across it that often, but there are portions of the site you can't acess without tripping across the logo/header/code.

I can't help but wonder about the timing and launch of My LJ in respects to this because that certaintly is a tantalizing way to get people to use the site rather than a client.

6A and LJ might seem to be the same business model but its consumers are different, usually for specific reasons, and its poor marketing and development to not realize that.

[redarius]

Thanks for the well reasoned explanation. Companies can and should collect data about their sites to promote quality development and better content streamlining.

This post is more than enough for me, and I appreciate both the tone and the content of what you've had to say.

[adcott]

What really bothers me is the ridiculously obfuscated Javascript communication that happens in addition to the cookies. If you're already tracking usage via cookies, why the JS aswell? and if the company is so reputable, why do they feel the need to make their code so stupidly inaccessible?

At the end of the day, I trust LiveJournal and I don't trust Hitbox (or indeed any company that specialises in the area of tracking customers, regardless of how saintly they supposedly are. Sorry.) I don't want to be forced to communicate with them every time I visit any LJ page. I want to be able to turn this off.

[crschmidt]

Reading through a slightly less obtuse version (http://crschmidt.net/projects/hbox.js) it's scary to me how much code there actually is in this thing. Combine that with the fact that at least 30 pieces of information are sent with every request...

It's pretty goddamn frightening, if you ask me.

[bekijane]

...and yet again the javascript has not been either mentioned or explained. This in a post apologising for not explaining.

Really not happy.

Waiting for my reply from feedback.

[imc]

I suspect the JavaScript is there because Hitbox/Websidestory said "OK, all you have to do is put this bit of JavaScript in all your pages" and the LiveJournal developers said "OK, right you are". Which was a bit silly of them if they don't have the first clue what it does. As Dave said, the likely reason why it's obfuscated is because Websidestory thinks it will make it harder for people to steal their technology. It seems LiveJournal has now asked for an explanation of what this code does, but obviously they have gone about things in the wrong order.

It's crazy - you could probably track all the relevant info in half a dozen lines of code. You can also fish quite a lot of it out of the standard web server logs without the need for any JavaScript, but that does take a bit of programming effort.

Incidentally, I object to JavaScript tracking bugs that report my screen size instead of my browser size. Both values are easily available. But I expect my JavaScript-disabled 640x700 browser window falls into a minority of one, anyway