Most blogs have used public access to Sitemeter statistics as an even, open, and unbiased measurement of traffic for the last several years, and it’s been a good system for that purpose. It hasn’t been without its occasional issues, but when seen over the breadth of time, no one can doubt their usefulness and generally excellent service.
Unfortunately, our readers began noticing some serious issues when using the new Internet Explorer 8 and Sitemeter’s code over the last few weeks. We’ve been bombarded with e-mails and comments about issues with site management, and we believe we have isolated it to Sitemeter’s scripting for traffic measurements. It only appears to affect IE8, but that’s getting widely distributed in the new Windows 7 release, and we have a lot more readers either switching to IE8 or upgrading to Win7 completely.
Reluctantly, we’ve had to remove it temporarily while we attempt to get Sitemeter’s help on the issue. That means we’ll track our traffic off of our servers and with our advertisers (who use their own measurements, of course), but that won’t be open to our readers. We regret having to do it, but it’s more important that our site operate properly for our readers than to measure the traffic in that manner. We’re looking forward to getting it back soon, and we’ll let you know when it’s back.
Update: Sitemeter is working with us to fix the problem, and we certainly appreciate their efforts.
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