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Just so you're aware, Disconnect actively breaks some sites, even when they aren't trying to be forcefully invasive. I have a site that logs AJAX requests to G
by Encosia 13y ago
Just so you're aware, Disconnect actively breaks some sites, even when they aren't trying to be forcefully invasive.
I have a site that logs AJAX requests to Google Analytics (since that's essentially the only "page views" on the particular site). I was doing a test for if (_gaq) before trying to push into the array, because I wasn't more concerned with giving the users a good experience than tracking page views, and that did work if Google Analytics was being blocked from loading at all. Unfortunately, I eventually learned that Disconnect was causing that test to throw a JavaScript exception instead of just blocking GA from loading and leaving _gaq undefined. As you can imagine, narrowing down that it was Disconnect causing the problem from a few random users' "the site isn't working" complaints was a lot of fun...
It's not a huge site, but I do spend a couple thousand dollars a year keeping it online. I'll be damned if I'm going to spend that to keep a free site online and then feel bad about running some advertising and analytics to make sure it doesn't end up in the red.
- dangoldin 13y agoJohn Resig talks about a similar problem and a potential solution - http://ejohn.org/blog/fixing-google-analytics-for-ghostery/ http://ejohn.org/blog/fixing-google-analytics-for-ghostery/
- Encosia 13y agoThat's essentially what I was doing previously, but the if (_gaq) test was throwing an unusual reference error when Disconnect was installed. I ended up finding that doing an explicit if (typeof _gaq === 'object') was safe (and then wrapped that in a try/catch for good measure).