Comment by kingcharles | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kingcharles | Hacker News Reader

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I would not recommend Plausible (well, their commercial offering anyway). I had a bad run-in with them recently. Their site would not log data from my web site at all (their Javascript just threw an error in the console and would not execute). I filed a ticket. They brushed it off and said they'd had a brief look and couldn't figure it out, and basically tough shit, and told me to just download their open source version and install it locally.

What annoyed me was that if it's not logging on my site, how many other sites is it under-reporting for? YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU DON'T KNOW. And the fact they weren't willing to give it any serious thought at all. This is bad for an analytics company.

I tried (begrudgingly) and put Google Analytics behemoth of Javascript on my site and it worked perfectly, so I knew it was a bug in their system, not mine.

At that point I decided to try and figure it out so I fired up a proxy and sat there for a couple of hours going back and forth until I did figure it out myself. The bug is in their web server configuration really, not in the actually logging Javascript. Now, it might have been unethical of me, I don't know, but I felt since I'd spent a ton of my time to figure out a serious bug in their product it would be nice if they would throw me a year's free subscription. I felt that was fair compensation. They said no way, don't worry about, basically "I'm sure we'll figure it out ourselves in the future one day, don't call us."

So at that point I decided screw it, I can see they don't care about their customers and product, so I'm looking for alternatives that aren't GA.

That's my 2 cents. Your mileage may vary.

tl;dr: Be aware their product has a bug which causes it to not log data in certain circumstances (the script won't execute) and therefore if you are using their commercial product you might not be seeing all your visitors.

That sucks that you had a bad experience with Plausible. I've never had any problems, and interactions with them on Twitter have always been very friendly and helpful.

Now, of course, products have bugs and once you have thousands of users there will be edge cases if it not working. Obviously, they should have handled the interaction with you differently.

Out of interest, can you expand more on when the bug occurs? Btw, if you have a fix for it, you can also create a PR.

I can't create a PR as the bug is with their server configuration. I don't think there is anything wrong with their code, per se. I think if I installed it locally it would work fine.

It is a real shame. I went to Plausible because they had posted on here, and I'm all for supporting people that show up on HN and seem to be decent human beings. They did not reply to my Tweet to them, I only got support through e-mail, which they weren't that quick about. I'm bummed because the software seemed to be what I wanted, but they've lost my trust now.

Oh I see. Again, I'm sorry that you had this experience. Hopefully they read this and can make it up to you somehow.

Curious - so what was the problem with their server configuration?

What's weird is that your comment here caused some sort of weird bug in HN that I've not seen before (no reply button): https://kingcharles.one/weird-hn-bug.png

@dang - any ideas on this one?

The issue with Plausible's server: I didn't want to put it out there because then they get the fix for their commercial product for free after I spent the time doing all the work for them, but I feel like the same bug might actually exist all over the Web, so I'm going to write it up and post it online.

I think HN somehow limit the pace of answers in fast threads to let people the time to think before they post (so the reply button appears with a bit of delay)

If you really must blow through the delay, click on the timestamp of the post you want to reply to and the reply box will show there.

That's what I did to reply, but I've never seen one person's reply link missing when all the others are visible.

> The issue with Plausible's server: I didn't want to put it out there because then they get the fix for their commercial product for free after I spent the time doing all the work for them, but I feel like the same bug might actually exist all over the Web, so I'm going to write it up and post it online.

Yeah, no. So far, you only say there's a bug in their server configuration that prevents logging in some cases. I self host plausible and I'd be very much interested in what misconfiguration I could have triggered.

Is it a TCP pool connection problem ? A pre-flight request thing ? Wrong CORS headers ?

On one hand you could be doing FUD, on the other there is a gunfoot problem that could impact self hosters but the knowledge doesn't come out.

I suppose it's a problem that can be pinpoint from the outside, without knowing the proxy stack running at plausible so it should be observable with HTTP sniffer/wireshark.

Why would that user create a PR to help a for-profit company they don't have a good relationship with? Why would anyone what to help a group that disrespected you?

And I would have happily created a PR for their open source version that they generously give away for free, but the bug is in their web server configuration for their hosted product, so they need to put the fix in.

I didn't feel I was being unreasonable asking for free use of their product for a year (after which I would obviously have to pay), for a web app I am writing which currently has practically zero traffic. As bug bounties go, it wasn't a bad deal I thought.

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