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tracking cookies

  1. I am researching a problem that has developed on my site. There are tracking urls showing up when my site loads, things like pixel.quantserve.com, b.scorecardresearch.com, ptrack.pubmatic.com, etc. They are loading slowing and the page often won't finish quickly until they are done. After checking out some wordpress plugin forum comments, it appears that these come from installing plug-ins. When I began to notice this, I only had Gravity Forms plug-in and Photoshelter's Widget from Graph Paper Press. So although I have recently added reCaptcha and Wordpress Importer to transfer old blog contents to new blog site, this problem was occurring before that. On a forum thread for the plug-in "Wordpress.com Stats" there are comments from users of that plug in that this is happening to them after they installed that (so I won't be using that one!). Please, someone at Gravity Forms, let me and other readers know if you have included code for these tracking cookies that are now on my site/computer so I can rule in or out whether G. Forms plug-in is using these features. thank you very much.

    Posted 14 years ago on Monday November 29, 2010 | Permalink
  2. Gravity Forms does not output any kind of tracking urls. So this isn't coming from Gravity Forms. Honestly that sounds like your site may be infected with some sort of malware. This doesn't sound like something a plugin would be doing.

    Posted 14 years ago on Monday November 29, 2010 | Permalink
  3. Thanks, Carl, for your feedback. I'm very glad to know you don't put anything in your form code.I downloaded a program called MacScan and am now trying to see if I have any malware on my system. I know these are cookies/tracking urls, as I was able to go to two of the websites and opt-out, which put an opt-out cookie on my computer, but the minute you clear the cookies in your browser, those 'opt-out' cookies go away and the tracking urls are back! So something I'm using is putting them back there every time. So that's not a 'permanent' solution to this problem. It just started happening when a) I switched from a server up in Canada to GoDaddy.com to host my site, b) I installed wordpress and just two plugins as mentioned in the above message and began to develop my site. The thread I was reading on the Wordpress plug-in mentioned above actually said they need the tracking stuff for 'future enhancements to the plug-in'. So they admitted that there is a tracking cookie in that particular author's plug-in which is what made me wonder about other plug-ins. here's the link to that wordpress thread for your reference/interest:

    http://wordpress.org/support/topic/plugin-wordpresscom-stats-quantserve-code-in-stats-javascript

    Not sure where I'll go from here but I'm certainly not done checking this out!

    Posted 14 years ago on Monday November 29, 2010 | Permalink
  4. Aha! For the record, I think I've found the problem and I wanted to share it here for anyone else who reads this thread. About the same time I uploaded my new site, I also installed Yontoo! Layers in my Firefox Browswer so I could change the background of my Facebook Page. I saw it flash by just before all the other tracking urls showed up, so I uninstalled it and voilá - the problem is gone. I had already deleted all cookies and run MacScan - which found 133 tracking cookies on my computer, but the problem existed. This solved it. Just food for thought.

    Posted 14 years ago on Tuesday November 30, 2010 | Permalink

This topic has been resolved and has been closed to new replies.