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Comment by ookware | Hacker News Reader

That's great, but all of that tracking is pointless if I can't actually complete the sale

That's not on TeeSpring, that's on Ublock Origin, which replaces the GA object with a dummy. The user is running code on their local machine that breaks his/her own ability to complete the sale.

And practically speaking, the back-stop is that if uBlock Origin causes too many high-profile websites to break, it'll get a reputation for degrading user experience and fewer users will install it.

When two independently-owned systems on the web break each other, "who needs to fix their stuff" is a question more of social networks and business politics than technology. TeeSpring's "fix" could be to pop a banner that says "WARNING: uBlock Origin breaks this site and we can't test for that."

That's not how it ends up working, though. People just share screenshots or tell friends of the broken website and people stop using the website not uBO.

And there are sites that will throw up a banner that says 'Adblockers might break this, if you have problems disable your Adblocker and try again' which is pretty effective. Funny enough, in my experience, sites with that banner tend to work with uBO enabled (probably because they're testing it).

> TeeSpring's "fix" could be to pop a banner that says "WARNING: uBlock Origin breaks this site and we can't test for that."

That'd be great. Then I, as a user of uBlock Origin, can nope-out of the site before wasting too much of my time and the site's resources.

> that's on Ublock Origin, which replaces the GA object with a dummy

There's absolutely nothing wrong with this. The blocker does it because just deleting the object would let obnoxious websites to detect its presence and punish users for it.

The better question is why their checkout completely breaks because of this. Their reliance on Google spyware is 100% on them and they are losing sales because of it.

It's not a very good dummy then as it's trivial to detect. PoC already exists in TFA.

Modifying client code (especially with an addon you do not control) and then complaining to the original code owner when functionality stop working is wrong.

Analytics and ads are annoying, I get it. However if you use an automated script to clear them out, be aware that some things might brake.

If Ublock Origin devs think they need to replace GA with a dummy to stop tracking they should've put a copy of the original interface with empty functions into it so the flow doesn't throw exceptions when the app tries to use it thinking everything's fine. Those scripts are publicly available and aren't a secret.

If your site put a selfish arrogant tracker in the way of completing the order... then you lost the sale. And the customer, who won't be coming back. I don't give a good god-damn about how it's "part of the site". It's not part of the transaction, and you put it there, and it broke things.

That's on the site for requiring tracking to be successful in order to take my money.

They shouldn't require tracking to succeed in order for me to buy the product. If they want tracking, sure. But be resistant to it erroring out. Don't let errors in 3rd party tools prevent your user from getting their core goals completed.

The same goes for client apps. Don't crash the app if it fails to log to a file. Don't crash the app if it can't sync your cache. Etc, etc. Don't let these unnecessary conveniences get in the users way.

The checkout shouldn't rely on GA.

Tracking should rely on the tracking service, not the checkout process

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