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Comment by mapgrep | Hacker News Reader

I'm very curious why an anonymous site that doesn't even allow registered users gets 100k worth of cookies on a typical connection.

Not saying you're doing anything wrong, just curious. I assume some of it is for ad tracking, but that's still a hell of a lot of data!

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Well it's a single kilobyte, but 100 KB in aggregate.

It's almost entirely Google Analytics, unfortunately. Our ads are served from a different domain (4chan-ads.org) for specifically this reason (user privacy and cookie bloat).

The newest version of Google Analytics eliminates most of the cookie bloat. There's now just a single id cookie that's around 30 bytes or so.

https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection...

Wasn't aware of this (but was hoping it was in the works) -- thanks a bunch!

Have you ever thought of running server-side analytics?

Yes, but every time I've investigated it, the tl;dr was "not worth it" given our requirements/constraints.

Google Analytics has its shortcomings, but it's a great product and free.

So you never encountered any problems with the free usage tier and its limitations? Asking out of curiosity, as we use it as well and break the hit-limits every month. My direct supervisor asked me, if I envisioned problems, and I told him, Google does not guarantee, but delivers non the less (as far as I knew at that time).

How do you feel about the believability of the data?

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