Imagine waking up and your site is inaccessible for no apparent reason. If this happens, site owners could spend a ridiculous amount of time trying to figure out what the problem is. Well welcome to that reality. Thousands of site owners have experienced this today after Sitemeter brings their sites to a halt.
Sitemeter is a free web analytics tool for keeping track of your site's visitors. A bug found in both the javascript and HTML widget made thousands of sites using Sitemeter inaccessible earlier today including popular blogs such as PerezHilton.com, Gizmodo, Valleywag, and Problogger. When users would visit any sites using Sitemeter, they would be presented with an error message pop-up:
Internet Explorer cannot open the Internet site http://www.sitename.comOperation aborted
The situation brings to light a lot of concerns about the internet and dependency on web products and services. However, the biggest concern is for Sitemeter as a company and how they decided to handle the situation with silence. For one, Sitemeter has made no moves to inform their public of what's going on. For those not as tech savvy as some of us, they were probably hit the hardest due to searching for a solution to a problem that they couldn't readily identify. Bad press for Sitemeter? Any press could be good press, but there's no doubt that this story and more will rank high in Google and Yahoo searches when users are searching for reviews about Sitemeter. Is this really what they want prospective customers to see?
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What a firm stance!
Posted by: Andy DeSoto
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August 2, 2008 1:03 PM
Ouch! That's why I developed my own web analyitcs app: http://www.i-stats.com and Google Analytics is NOT real-time (I have no idea how they can get away with that), so if you use Google Analytics and your site is mentioned on a high traffic blog, you won't know until a day or so later...
Posted by: Felipe | August 2, 2008 1:43 PM
Sitemeter had a similar situation happen before when they pushed an update that included audience profiling code from an ad network. Many bloggers complained about the lack of disclosure, and the silence from Sitemeter.
I'm interested in the story about the IE bug, but I'm more interested in the question: What was in the code update?
Posted by: Fred | August 2, 2008 2:31 PM
OK, now we know why we couldn't visit http://happytutors.com yesterday, also why we have fewer visits today! - We thought something was wrong with IE and just simply used FireFox instead :-(
SiteMeter should have informed its users this issue, eventhought it's free.
Posted by: HappyTutors.com - Connect Tutors with Students and Parents | August 2, 2008 5:52 PM
They've updated on their blog with a little more information at http://weblog.sitemeter.com/2008/08/02/sitemeter-ie-issues-resolved/
it doesn't really say much except that it's resolved and comments are closed - but I guess at least it's something, if after the events. It certainly caused chaos for a few hours there for many.
Posted by: Darren Rowse | August 3, 2008 5:49 AM
Good to know this. I am happy that I didn't install Sitemeter for tracking. The current trackers installed are Statcounter, Google Analytics, Feedburner, and the newly innovative desktop client, Woopra. I just love Woopra. I will check out RWW to see any archive content about this.
Lenin
Posted by: Lenin Nair | August 4, 2008 11:19 AM
Welcome to the sad world of IE..... I just hope that IE fixes this bug (Operation Aborted) soon, and properly.
The good news is that you can track it over on web bug track its bug 404.
http://webbugtrack.blogspot.com/2008/08/bug-404-operation-aborted-in-ie.html
It looks like the new version of IE might be a bit better but not perfect.
Posted by: tim | August 7, 2008 6:45 PM
Why do we need sitemeter at all, while revolutionary applications like Woopra are coming up.
I recently got approved by Woopra and reviewed it here.
Sitemeter though helps in terms of live traffic, my results were awful. So, I recently got it removed. Indeed, now I feel better after reading this post, otherwise I could have got this issue too for my blog.
Lenin
Posted by: Lenin Nair | August 29, 2008 6:04 AM