Webstats4u: avoid like the plague | The Coffeehouse

Sven Groot
My name has 9 letters. Coincidence? I think not...

Many people may be familiar with the old Nedstat Basic. It's a free counter and website statistics service, that was probably the most used counter certainly on Dutch websites, but it was also seen on a lot of non-Dutch sites. All in all, it was a very popular service.

Nedstat Basic was sold to some German advertising firm. They modified this great free service. Not only did they change the name to Webstats4u, they also revamped the page (read: they added more ads). So far, it's not so bad.

But, get this: they changed the script you're supposed to include from the pages you want the counter on so that it shows a friggin' popup whenever you visit a page that has the counter on it. This popup is shown once every 48 hours (a cookie is planted on the client with a 48 hour lifetime, and the popup won't be shown again until it expires).

This is, quite simply, unacceptable behaviour. Suddenly, pages everywhere started getting complaints from users that suddenly saw popups. People started blogging about this, enraged, and en masse, people decided to abandon Webstats4u. Way to lose the Nedstat Basic userbase, Webstats4u, well done!

Quite frankly, I'm surprised this hasn't shown up here yet, considering all the talk that's been going around about it.

Of all the filthy schemes, this has to be the worst. Adding popups to other people's sites, without giving any kind of hint that they were going to do this? Yeah, there's some kind of ultra vague loophole in their revised terms of service that allows them to do it, but who reads those anyway.

And don't tell me about popup blockers. It's the principle of the thing.

The line must be drawn here! This far, no further!

androidi

Like you say, pop-ups can be blocked and they *are*. I am *seriously* more annoyed by the floating ads that block the content and input boxes. For example there was a ad at IMDB that blocked the search box for several seconds! And that MS ad at the web design site that floated in middle of the page was annoying as well.

So pop-ups have been blocked, it is time to have IE block all the other nasty ads. And given Firefox's poor security track record don't even suggest that. Smiley

Maurits
AKA Matthew van Eerde

androidi wrote:
Firefox's poor security track record

Uh, what? Has there ever been a reported case of data loss due to a Firefox security breach?

W3bbo
The Master of Baiters

People think that those "Positioned box" (aka "layer") popups can't be blocked.

Quite wrong indeed Smiley

With a bit of hackery, you can get "NukeAnything" and AdBlock (both excellent extensions for Firefox) to block those equally well.

Plus, just clicking "Remove this" on any advert works fine for me anyway Smiley

bsilby

androidi wrote:
Like you say, pop-ups can be blocked and they *are*. I am *seriously* more annoyed by the floating ads that block the content and input boxes. For example there was a ad at IMDB that blocked the search box for several seconds! And that MS ad at the web design site that floated in middle of the page was annoying as well.

So pop-ups have been blocked, it is time to have IE block all the other nasty ads. And given Firefox's poor security track record don't even suggest that.

I agree with everything here. It is an invasion to subversively put popups on people's sites, who simply wanted a webstat system.

And as to those horrible dhtml and flash floating ads--these are terrible for a number of reasons. Not the least of which is that they will eventually force people (and browsers) to try to determine what dhtml and flash to block. That means a lot of legitimate dhtml and flash content will end up getting blocked too.

I have no problem with banner ads. I can even tolerate those "in-between" ads that say "click to continue loading page". But any ad that blocks a sites content is unacceptable, and constitutes bad site design on the part of site owners who install these ads.

I think advertising can ruin the look of a site. And flash ads are often real cpu pigs. I've removed all the advertising from my site. I figure the improved look and performance of the site more than offsets my small drop in revenue.

Brent Silby.

Sven Groot
My name has 9 letters. Coincidence? I think not...

You're missing the point, kinda. I don't care if it's a popup, a flash ad, a site takeover, a banner, or whatever.

They are putting advertisements on other people's sites, for God's sake! Show ads on the statistics page? Fine. Popups on the statistics page? No problem there. But force ads onto the pages of thousands of websites that happen to use what used to be an excellent free counter? That's going to far.

And the TOS are just rediculous. What it actually says is that they can't put ads on your site directly. The thing is the word directly, because it leaves it open for them to do it indirectly. And they obviously don't consider popups as adding ads directly.

How would you feel if you had an ad-free site, and all of the sudden you're getting mails from your users complaining about popups on your site, blaming you for those popups?

TommyCarlier
I want my scalps!

I'm using Webstats4u, and I don't have this problem. The thing is: you don't have to include a script. You can just use a small image. This is what the HTML code looks like:

bsilby

Sven Groot wrote:

How would you feel if you had an ad-free site, and all of the sudden you're getting mails from your users complaining about popups on your site, blaming you for those popups?

I'd be extrememly pissed-off. Especially if I couldn't immediately figure out where the ads were coming from. It might take some people a bit of time to figure out that the free, ad-free stat system that they signed up for was, in fact, washing the site with ads.

Damn them !!!

Sven Groot
My name has 9 letters. Coincidence? I think not...

TommyCarlier wrote:
I'm using Webstats4u, and I don't have this problem. The thing is: you don't have to include a script. You can just use a small image. This is what the HTML code looks like: <a target='_blank' href='http://v1.nedstatbasic.net/stats?yourcode'><img src='http://m1.nedstatbasic.net/n?id=yourcode' border='0' width='18' height='18' alt='Counter'></a>

I know but it doesn't measure as much that way. And I actually modified their script a while back (when they were still Nedstat, before all this mess) to be XHTML compliant. So, I'm not personally affected by the problem.

I'm still going to remove the counter from my sites as soon as I've found a good alternative. I don't care if that means losing 5 years of statistics history; I simply refuse to use anything from a company that would even consider doing such a thing.

Maurits
AKA Matthew van Eerde

Did they send you a notification of the change of ownership? They might have buried something in there (or a page linked from there) to the effect that "oh yeah, and we're going to start showing popup ads too."

TommyCarlier
I want my scalps!

Please let us know if you've found a good alternative.

Sven Groot
My name has 9 letters. Coincidence? I think not...

Maurits wrote:
Did they send you a notification of the change of ownership? They might have buried something in there (or a page linked from there) to the effect that "oh yeah, and we're going to start showing popup ads too."

I don't know. The e-mail address I've registered with them is long gone, and I've forgotten the account password so I can't change it. Not having the password has never been a problem since I've never needed to change the account settings.

From what other people wrote on the subject I don't believe there was any kind of fair warning.

inertia

Dear friends, I recently found this topic post and thought it would be a nice idea to answer it.. (yeah, my first post here!)

I am a university student from Greece, on the dept. of Product & Systems Design Engineering of the University of the Aegean (http://www.aegean.gr). Our department's situated on Syros island. 4 years ago, as 1rst year students, we launched a Web Community website, for the members of our Uni and any other visitor is interested for our Uni and general issues. We are a growing community and we see a lot of friends here to take part on many activities. Our website belongs to our Uni's infrastucture, as part of the academic services, as a formal student (and not only) community. More info on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MyAegean

To get to the point, recently, some of our members compaigned for several pop-ups that they faced. Doing a small search over the net, I found this topic. I would like to state it for anyone's information. We are really aware of this issue, as our community acts as a totally non-profit, voluntary project, and also as an academic site, as part of our Uni's. If it really happens this via Webstats4U, it is cruel, the least I can say! We are thinking to remove the code of Websats4U as soon as possibel.

If anyone has more info, you can PM me.

Reference for this issue and possible Webstats4U pop-ups(in Greek): http://my.aegean.gr/web/ftopict-321.html

Thanx for everything!