Excess of Democracy blog has a post about trackers on lawprof blogs. Coincidentally, I spent a couple of hours today trying to figure out why it is that gtmerix reports that discourse.net has this redirect, which both slows the site and amounts to a tracker on users:
- http://b.scorecardresearch.com/b?c1=8&c2=2101&c3=1234567891234567891&ns__t=1389660579364&ns_c=windows-1252&c8=&c7=http%3A%2F%2Fdg.specificclick.net%2F%3Fy%3D3%26t%3Dh%26u%3Dhttp%253A%252F%252Fwww.discourse.net%252F%26r%3D&c9=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.discourse.net%2F
- http://b.scorecardresearch.com/b2?c1=8&c2=2101&c3=1234567891234567891&ns__t=1389660579364&ns_c=windows-1252&c8=&c7=http%3A%2F%2Fdg.specificclick.net%2F%3Fy%3D3%26t%3Dh%26u%3Dhttp%253A%252F%252Fwww.discourse.net%252F%26r%3D&c9=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.discourse.net%2F
I certainly didn’t put any of that in here on purpose. I have grepped all the code for this site and the words “scorecardresearch” and “specificclick” don’t appear anywhere in it. That means either something is inserting the code, or it is obfuscated in some way.
I can imagine three possibilities: (1) a plugin has some javascript; (2) something in the right margin; (3) a malicious code injection.
I tried disabling several of the plugins (but not all as some are essential), but nothing changed. I tried removing a couple of the most likely suspects from the right margin, but that wasn’t it. I don’t know how to look for the code injection.
Any thoughts on how best to track this down?
Maybe you were hacked? Just a thought!. I can check with our IT support specialist if you can’t quite figure it out!.
Unfortunately, I have NOT been able to figure this one out.
It’s sitemeter.
http://s17.sitemeter.com/js/counter.asp?site=s17discourse
loads a bunch of javascript which calls
“http://dg.specificclick.net/?y=3&t=h&u=” + encodeURIComponent(document.location) + “&r=” + encodeURIComponent(SiteMeter.getReferralURL()
which calls scorecardresearch.
HTH
Thank you. Should I kill it? Is there a decent replacement?
If you really feel you need a counter — many don’t any more, relying on the data on their servers — you might consider CQCounter, which has a much lower “footprint” and is free. My own preference is to just look at awstats output, which gives me more information than I need!