The claims we took down

The old about page had a feature list on it. Rebuilding that page meant reading the list properly for the first time in a while, and four things on it were no longer true. One of them had not been true for years.

They are gone now. Here is what they were, because a quiet deletion is worth less than an explanation.

Screen resolutions

Advertised on the page, and not collected — on purpose, since 10 August. The measurement was a read of the visitor's device and a good way to recognise the same person again, and it was not worth what it cost anybody.

Taking it out of the script was not enough on its own: the script is cached in browsers for up to a week, and some sites embed a copy they pasted years ago. Those kept sending the value. So the server stopped accepting the parameter at all, which ends the collection now rather than eventually. The figures gathered before that date are still there and no longer grow.

What stayed on the page is what is still measured, and the post about counting without a cookie covers the reasoning.

Site speed

There is a post from 2013 announcing it, and it worked. It belonged to the previous version of this system and it did not come back in the rebuild. An old announcement staying up is fine — that is a record of what happened. Listing it in the present tense on the page where somebody decides whether to use this is not.

Internet Explorer and Windows 8

Browsers and operating systems are still recognised, versions included, and that part of the page stayed. What went was the framing: naming Internet Explorer and Windows 8 as the impressive thing to detect reads like a page written in 2013, which is exactly what it was.

Regional maps for Russia

The regional breakdowns are real and they are worth having. They exist for Germany, Austria, Poland, Ukraine, the United States and Canada. Russia was on the list on the page and not in the software.

The same paragraph also promised animated globes. There are globe-shaped flag counters and there is a world map on the statistics page; a live animated globe there is not.

Why bother writing this down

A feature list is a promise, and somebody picks a tool on the strength of it. Four wrong entries is four people arriving for something that is not here.

It also went wrong in ten languages at once. The text had been translated years ago and every translation carried the same claims, so fixing the English would have left nine wrong copies standing. That is the argument for keeping the promises short and checking them against the code rather than against last year's version of the page.