opentracker

[grazhina]

I mentioned in the chit chat section that something called opentracker.net has been recently giving me problems here when I view on Google Chrome .

I've been doing a little investigating, can't find out much except that it's a tracker used primarily by businesses to see what their customers are looking at. I see now that it's listed as one of the urls at the bottom of the page whenever I look at Greenleaf, but not anywhere else.

Is opentracker part of normal forum function that's just messing with Chome, or could someone have stuck a code for it into a post?

[Deb]

Opentracker is a simple web analytic program used to help make it easier to manage really large websites. All it tracks is the hits per page, where the hits are linking from and search words/engines used to get to the site. It does NOT track any other information and doesn't have the ability to see anything about individual users. It's basically the same thing as Google analytics or the analytic reports provided by domain hosts. The reason businesses use it is because it's more efficient for big websites. I envy the reports because they're soooooooo much nicer than the ones I get from my domain analytic.

Just to put everyone's mind at ease (coz these things tend to be a little scary), I can swear on my Willowcrest that Dean would never put anything on the forum or any of the other Greenleaf sites that gathers any information except statistics from here. Those are things like "how many people come to the forum from the GL webstore" and "There are suddenly a lot of hits on the blog page...........<looking up a stat>...okay, they're coming from the newsletter". The tracker info can also catch spammers before they get started since it can show suspicious activity like someone systematically going thru the member pages and accessing the email/pm links. So the only reason it's there is to give Dean the stats he needs to keep the forum running smoothly and safely. There is nothing on this site that would put anything on your computer except a simple cookie. It's normal to see 'waiting for opentracker" because the cookie is loading, but if it's crashing your browser, then there's an outside factor involved.

Grazhina, what you're describing is usually caused by security software timing out while trying to scrutinize cookies or blocking a browser component from loading. Nortons is one of the most notorious about that. <grinning> It keeps telling me it's found a trojan which scares the heck out of me till I open the log file and discover that it classifies Google analytics and components of Chrome as a trojan. Other av programs adopt their definitions from Nortons and can do the same thing. There is a well known conflict between Nortons and a couple others with Chrome plug ins which could be causing the problem. Since it's happening on a specific thread, chances are that the cookie or cached page for that thread have become corrupted or a component Chrome uses to load that page is identified as a problem. The other possible problem would be a cookie or data miner from another website is hogging resources and causing Chrome to time out because opentracker doesn't have resources to load the page. I'm sure you've already cleared your cache and cookies, but you might want to run something like Adaware of Spybot S&D which do a deep clean (a little more effective than Exterminate It). Webroot SpySweeper is probably the best on the market but it's not free. If it keeps happening after that you might need to uninstall and reinstall Chrome. A last resort would be to run HiJack This to find something that has burrowed into the registry files deeper than the other programs can go. I don't recommend manually removing anything found by Hijack unless you're really comfortable working in the reg files.

I hope that helps a little. One thing I do want to reassure everyone about..........Dean and Logan have some of the best security in place to keep our forum safe. The forum is constantly being scanned to make sure no malevolent code is snuck in on a link or anywhere else. We're as safe here as if we were in Mother's arms.

Deb

[Minis On The Edge]

I was just typing up a reply :lol: Thank You Deb for explaining this in terms simple enough to understand LOL. I am having one of those days where the words seem to fail me and I started typing a reply in a different "window" and am so glad I clicked refresh so I could see your reply! Hope your response answers any questions!

[rodentraiser]

Wow! Deb, that was awesome. I even understood that and I have a hard time with stuff like that. Thank you!

[Merry]

As I understand it, google is running in the background constantly. Is it the same with opentracker?

[Deb]

Y'all are welcome! Sometimes my previous life as a techy comes in handy. LOL! Mary, there may be components of Chrome I'm not aware of that are always running as a process but for the most part, it all shuts down when you close Chrome. If you have the Google toolbar in IE or another browser, that will also shut down when you close the browser. However, the automatic updater for both programs is usually "on" all the time but only active when it's checking for or downloading new updates.

Opentracker is just a cookie so the only time it activates is when you're surfing the forum (or another website which uses Opentracker). The only "activity" from Opentracker is when a forum page is accessed. The cookie sends a little blip to the Opentracker server telling it which page was accessed on the forum.......basically it's a hit counter but instead of displaying "number of visits" on the webpage it just puts it in a report for the website owner.

Deb

[grazhina]

Thanks for the answer. I don't know why it freezes up on just a couple of threads as far as I know. It just started a few days ago. I'm over on IE right now.

It's good to know it's not something creepy.