Lotus Geek :: Bye-bye WebStats4U (formerly Nedstat)

Category Announcements
Bookmark :

Since I started this blog I used a free counter service known as Nedstat. In fact, I recommended it to quite a few other bloggers, including Rich Schwartz, Ben Langhinrichs, Tom "Duffbert" Duff, and many more. Well, Nedstat was bought by someone else and rebranded WebStats4U. OK, no biggie - or so I thought.

Boy, was I wrong.

I use Firefox, and I had noticed that occasionally I had a random popup, or popunder, that I couldn't associate with a site. I could never put my finger on what the cause was - until today. Carl Tyler noticed the popups on my blog and others, and Rich saw Carl's post and narrowed it down to WebStats4U.

So, because of their sleuthing, I have immediately removed the NedStat/WebStats4U counter, and have deleted my account with them.

Hopefully that will take care of the problem. I apologize to those of you who have been annoyed by these popups, as I had no idea why it was happening. Hopefully removing the counter and account will take care of the problem once and for all.

And, since I thought Rich said it as well or better than I could, let me echo his comments concerning WebStats4U and their practices...

They did keep to their word. They didn't place ads "directly into" my site. They used their code, called from within my site, to generate popups outside of my site's window. Therefore it would be wrong for me to say "WebStats4U are a bunch of slimeballs". It would be wrong for me to say "WebStats4U are popup spammers". It would be wrong for me to say "WebStats4U suck". So, please, Google... don't pay any attention to those statements. People who search on "WebStats4U" might get the impression that I actually think they are slimeball popup spammers who suck, and I must keep to my word just precisely as they did by emphasizing that I do not want anyone to come to the wrong conclusion about WebStats4U.

Good riddance. And thanks to Rich and Carl for discovering the cause, and to Andrew for pointing out Rich's blog entry to me to make me aware of the situation.

Rock
**The number one cause of computer problems is computer solutions.

Comments

1 - I have decided to give StatCounter.com a try - they are free, promise no popups, etc., and seem to be pretty good. They have a GREAT wizard that walks you through the process of creating your counter, and you get many more options for display.

http://www.statcounter.com

Let me know what you think...

Rock

Posted by Rock At 05:13:47 PM On 09/20/2005 | - Website - |

2 - I'm with Rock on this. I used Nedstat knowing full well that there are good commercial tools for analyzing the local web logs, but configuring Nedstat was easier. Yeah, I could pay for the Pro version, but it's not really the ideal solution. Nedstat causes extra network site visitors. If I'm going to pay for something, it might as well be a tool that doesn't impose costs on visitors.

OTOH, I checked with Bruce Elgort, whom I recall showing me the stats for openntf.org at one point, and they looked real good. I figured it probably wasn't a commercial tool. and Bruce told me that I was right about that. He's using AWStats, with is free as in beer. Julian posted an article about how to configure AWStats to run on Domino http://www.nsftools.com/tips/UsingAwstatsWithDomino.htm That's what I'm going to look into, probably.

Posted by Richard Schwartz At 09:56:03 PM On 09/20/2005 | - Website - |

3 - So now the question arises... what to use for statistics? Before I enabled my nedstat account, I had an agent that I ran against my log files. I ran it nightly and it produced some useful info; but it was slow and not nearly as useful as what Nedstat gave me.

Posted by Richard Schwartz At 04:36:36 PM On 09/20/2005 | - Website - |

4 - There is one simple solution:

Edit the netstad-code, remove the complete "<script>"-part and the "<noscript>" and "</noscript>"-Tags. You'll get non-JS-Code and no popup anymore.
Cause they have the alternative of a noscript, they will not recognize your edits.

Chris

Posted by Chris At 02:38:00 AM On 10/28/2005 | - Website - |

5 - I'm relieved I don't have some new unknown virus. Glad to hear it's sorted.

Posted by Carl At 04:06:19 PM On 09/20/2005 | - Website - |

6 - I had the same problem, but worst, when I saw my thumbnail at alexa, in my kids oriented website there were porn ads! so if you use nedstat go check in alexa how it looks like!

Posted by Ana At 03:20:00 PM On 03/30/2006 | - Website - |

7 - Well, I know it goes against the grain to actually pay for anything these days, but I pay for NedStatPro and it does not seem to have any of these problems.

Genii Software, where we think paying for stuff is good!

Posted by Ben Langhinrichs At 06:06:12 PM On 09/20/2005 | - Website - |

8 - Sorry, we here at LotusGeek understand the need to pay for some stuff (e.g. to get a feature otherwise unavailable, etc.), but we also are of the belief:

"Why pay for something when I can get it for free?"