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Comment by ryan_f | Hacker News Reader

I was hoping the article would be a little more informative and definitive according to the title. It is based on assumptions itself with a little theory behind it.

As for the statement - "The first is that the traffic coming in had JavaScript disabled. If this was the case then the JavaScript analytics software would not detect the incoming traffic and therefore would not be able to log the result at all." You can track incoming requests outside of javascript through the server. That is possibly what they had wrote.

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I can't believe someone who has 'delivered highly scalable solutions' actually managed to write this line on his blog with a straight face. How were you not able to deduce that the devs likely detected disabled javascript without the use of javascript?

His whole post is devoid of content and nothing but statements without any real substance or evidence.

How do you reliably check that javascript is turned off without resorting to javascript?

edit: never mind; an img in a noscript tag.

Or. Hits to a website result in a list of unique IPs accessing the site. Remove any IPs from the list which are known to be running JavaScript. The remaining IPs aren't running JavaScript or are ignoring/breaking your script.

This begs the question whether or not there was a scenario where there was a hit to the site, the referrer was set to Facebook, JS was enabled in the browser, but the resulting hit didn't result in a JS enabled request to the analytics software.

Another poster mentioned prefetching as a likely culprit. Google is known to prefetch search results for you, but it requires the use of the rel="prerender" tag. I find it highly unlikely that is what's happening here.

The point of my article was not on how the dev was detecting JS. So I didn't want to go into detail on it. Even if he did that (which he never claims he does) He would only see that people are coming in with JS turned off, not that they came from facebook.

He does make the claim that 80% the clicks they were paying for had JS disabled. That would imply the referrers were set on those requests to be from Facebook and the IPs hitting the pages weren't registering in his JS based analytics package. We know he's logging the hits to a file, so presumably that data is there.

You claimed 'There were a few false assumptions made in the post. The first is that the traffic coming in had JavaScript disabled.' Care to elaborate on how it's a false assumption if the implied statement above is true?

I'll give you that he may be wrong, but I really don't see where there's concrete evidence to support your claim he's making false assumptions!

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