It appears the entire Sitemeter site is hosed. If you use the Javascript version, it fails in IE, but if you use the code in the NOSCRIPT tags, it seems to work, although it probably isn’t tracking correctly.

For a laugh, try using Google to find “Sitemeter,” then try opening Site Meter’s web site — same result. After reading your entry here, I wondered if they knew what their software is doing. I still wonder. <:(

Thanks for posting your information, since I was wondering if something was wrong with my PC, as I couldn’t open a couple of my favorite blogs including Instapundit.

I reported the issue to Sitemeter about an hour ago on their contact page. I guess that would be 9:30 PM EDT.

Sitemeter Bug Open Trackback Weekend…

It’s true; Sitemeter is causing major problems for blogs displaying it’s code. SiteMeter is bringing down every site where its counter code is loaded when the visiting browser is Internet Explorer ve……

1WebDiva: No problem. We were right in the middle of working on stylesheet and design changes on the site and everything went haywire. You can picture us rifling through our code trying to figure out what we had done… then to think “wow, our code totally screwed up internet explorer on our machines, because now EVERY site is failing.”

And then, finally, the realization that our code was JUST FINE. It was someone else’s (eh hem, sitemeter).

Glad we can help…

More… and people look at me like I’m crazy when I speak of recent media news concerning digital trade with countries abroad… and how so many of the items contain viruses and trojans. And the other articles that deal with a concept of WWIII not being atomic, but digital. Today for me, was a real eye opener. Hey, shut down the banking, and maybe the airlines, and throw in the utilities for a number of the major cities. What do we have? I call it War is Hell.

support@sitemeter.com is their support address

here is the message I got (minus the ticket # and code name)

Your request has been received and a member of our support staff will review it and reply as soon as possible. Listed below are details of this request. Please make sure the Ticket ID remains in the subject at all times.

Ticket ID: xxxxxxxx
Codename:s36xxxxxxx
Category: Technical Issue
Priority: Normal
Status: Open

Please let us know if we can assist you any further,

Site Meter Support

john: don’t think so. I’ve an s47 site that’s failing as well… and another blogger with an s29: same thing.

Ugh after playing around with my plugins, moving around code, googling about the error, deactivating plugins and activating them again, I finally realized that this was the culprit. Then I did a google and found this site, so glad to hear it’s not just me. I thought something was strange when I went to numerous sites that I could view before but suddenly couldn’t view.

I hope it gets fixed soon!

Thanks for the code! I have a blog and IE 7 can open it but IE 6 can’t. I’m so over sitemeter. And since it’s the weekend (as usual), there won’t be anyone to fix it!

I emailed someone named “Andy” about it. Hopefully his nonresponse means he’s too busy to read it. Now I have to remove the bad code without crashing my template.

Just comment out the sitemeter code, it worked for me

I have sitemeter on all my sites, lol…

My Saturday morning got ruined

Thanks for the posting. Glad to know it’s actually the sitemeter causing the problem instead of my blog having problem. I’ve commented out the code and my blog is loading fine now.
Huh, it’s not the first time happened to me and it was weekend at that time too. I met the problem (diffrent from what happen now) that sitemeter didn’t appear at all in my blog and I couldn’t log in at my account at the sitemeter web too, just right after few days i registered. Then I wrote an email to the sitemeter support and they get the bug fixed within 2days (about on following Monday or Tuesday). So hopefully they will fix it soon on next coming Monday or Tuesday too.

I have over 4000 pages & 25 sites that use Sitemeter! This guy takes forever to fix anything & doesn’t respond! This happened about the same way a year ago & it took him a week to fix it!

Thanks, man for the heads-up! I was going nuts clearing cache, flushing dns, trying to remember the password for my router, lol.

[...] The current solution is simply to take sitemeter off your page, as suggested here. [...]

[...] below).  Then I realized there were some other sites giving me the same error.  I finally found this information with some Googling.  It appears to be all sites using sitemeter on their pages and the sitemeter [...]

You did a great job in discovering this because most of my forum users use IE. I wonder what will happen between sitemeter and IE. *SITS BACK TO WATCH THE HASSLES*

Had same problem – removed code and works fine now. Logged Site Meter support through Firefox on their site (as inaccessabke through IE) – Site Meter’s a good service, but this is a big downfall. Worth it? Hmm…

The ultimate fix, sitemeter.com is the problem. If you go into your internet explorer security settings and add the following to restricted sites then the page loads.
http://*.sitemeter.com

I think the most annoying aspect of this is the fact that other sites have plagiarized your post, added and subtracted here and there, and reposted it as their own. Some of these copycat sites are now the top-ranked Google results for searches for this problem.

Like I said on my site, I really wish my SiteMeter were up right now so I could see how many hits this problem is generating! AdSense tells me I’ve already had about 50% of my usual daily number of visitors, and it’s only 9:00 AM – on a Saturday, when most people aren’t surfing from work.

All of my Sitemeter codes are just before the tag, and not in tables. Didn’t stop this from happening. However, this fix listed above, ” http://*.sitemeter.com ” in the restricted sites for Security, takes it ALL out of the pages…. the icon doesn’t even appear and the sites load fine. Hmmmm. That’s good for we who know what is going on, but is useless for most of our visitors. Sitemeter is coming down off all my couple dozen sites, today. What really bugs me is, as mentioned before, the slowness of Sitemeter service. I’ve had problems in the past, and this thing looks like S.M. isn’t even aware! It would seem logical, since they have a newsletter “list,” that some kind of Email could be sent out to users worldwide. In the end, this small act could literally “save his butt.” And another question: Is this happening with PAID Sitemeter accounts?

Hi Delta, thanks for passing this along. Again, I ask, what part of “tell your customers” does Sitemeter not understand? Even this notice, posted to just their Support page, could have been sent out as a listmail alert. Even if it turns out that the current chaos is not a part of their server migration/maintenance, at least users would have had a heads up on WHERE to start with this, once the crashing began. However, I am willing to bet that this very alert is behind all of this. sigh. Internet life. Gotta love it. We indeed are at the mercy of every service that runs the thing.

For a good portion of the night, I’ve been over at Hotscripts.com and similar, looking through what is available as a SCRIPT for web stats. There seem to be a number of good ones. Anyone have any experience with a script that would be on your own server, and not reliant on an outside service? I would think Cpanel/Fantastico would offer something like this. But it looks like it does not.

I’ve been slowly implementing Google Analytics on several of my sites. This seems an excellent solution. However, “going there” seems a pain. One thing I do like about Sitemeter is the instant click to view things.

I tried Opera and it worked just fine (a nice alternative to IE and Firefox).

I’m not sure there’s anyone in the sitemeter office during the weekend, but one would think just by being on the internet, there would be some clue what was going on.

[...] More info here [...]

[...] – the service that practically the whole blogoverse uses to see who’s come to dinner – was causing browser crashes in IE 5.5 and 7. Quite suddenly and without warning. After having served diligently for pretty much [...]

Wow! What a life saver. I’ve been going stupid for hours and so has my webhost who has also been trying to track down the problem.
Who would have thought that good old Sitemeter, which I’ve been using for years, would suddenly prevent my website from loading. I promptly removed it and… Hey Presto! Sitemeter is certainly not the culprit I would have expected so I’m really very very very grateful to have been saved from several sleepless nights!

Re: the Memo from Sitemeter Support, the server I am/was on, SM3, is not listed there, but it got affected too.

I was up until the wee hours of this morning getting the code removed from my website as well. Like others, I have used Sitemeter for at least a decade with no problems. I had to call a friend of mine and deliver the bad news to her over the phone. She is going to have a long day too.

Yeah, My IE 6.0 readers are showing up now on site. My IE 7 visitors were fine the whole time for some reason and I couldn’t get a test on 6.0 but my traffic with that browser dropped off after 3:55 pm yesterday. But no sitemeter unless I go through Firefox.

I’m amazed if they actually had someone there on the weekend who knew what was going on. I still remember the “Black Friday” implosion.

FERG, THANK YOU for providing the step by step directions for a tech dummy! ‘Preciate it!

I blamed my host, the host blamed my ISP… and then I found this thread. Thank goodness it is SiteMeter and not one of those! My sites are back – SiteMeter’s site is not… I may have to switch to a new one – but I will give them some time before I go through all that.

6 of 7 of my sites were down this morning (UK) with the message regarding being unable to open. The clue was that one of these sites is live but does not have Sitemeter and the others did. This one site was OK. I was having a go at my ISP first but did a test to comment the sitemeter code on the main site and it worked following that. It would have been quite a big job to extract all the sitemeter code so I left it for a while hoping things would improve, and all 6 sites are now operating again. However Sitemeter.com does not allow logon and still displays the original “unable to open” error.

What concerns me about this is NO COMMUNICATION from Sitemeter. If I were still in my old job as a system applications manager, did a big release on Friday and walked away for the weekend (as it appears with nothing else to go on) I would probably have been fired for gross misconduct.

Plus the length of time the systems have been down means potential loss of business as some have e-commerce facilities.

A similar problem with service occurred a few months ago when a whole week’s worth of stats just dropped out. The response was – Oh sorry, but we can’t get it back. Oh dear, very unprofessional and where’s the backup? The same may have happened here where a release has been made and bits are wonky and untested. The best solution would be to back it out quickly to avoid inconveniencing clients paid or not (if you paid for this how do you feel now?) and rerelease the previous version to a synch point. Then get the damn thing fixed properly before releasing!

I must say this is the first major fault for a long time but it does not inspire confidence when no one appears to either know about it in Sitemeter or are just keeping quiet and hope it will all blow over. I don’t think so!

Looks like they’re finally releasing information about it:

http://weblog.sitemeter.com/

[...] One Project Closer [...]

Some feedback on other posts…. I just tried to access the Sitemeter site. If you go to http://sitemeter.com, you will get the IE7 message that the page does not exist. If you key in http://www.sitemeter.com, it goes there with no problem (with the www in the address). And I was able to log in to the 6-7 of my 24 accounts. So except for the fact that it SHOULD also be working with the web address without the www, it’s working again for me.

And yes, as mentioned above, what tipped me off so early in the game, like within minutes of things going down, was the status bar message that the sitemeter image was not loading. But that happens a lot on the Net. But it’s not enough to “take things down.” So it wasn’t the non-loading of the image, but whatever the coding issue was. Quite frankly this is a new one on me. This particular message and then the browser crash… I’ve never had this happen. In 14 years online. I still think I am going to migrate to a different solution. This was very high stress, eh? LOL.

Great…and now this…

http://anothermonkey.blogspot.com/2008/08/is-sitemeters-site-infected-with-virus.html

[...] and jumping from one blog to another, i saw this site, talking about the problem and thus concluding about sitemeter. I’m glad i don’t need [...]

It isn’t fixed.

I had to remove Sitemeter today when I doscovered that visitors were being redirected to some Google search. After I deleted the Sitemeter code, the problem went away.

Pity. I used to like the Sitemeter service.

Please help me, i try to found site meter in my HTML file but i can’t found it. my blog still cannot open.

[...] Operation abort problem caused by Sitemeter… Firefox works fine http://www.oneprojectcloser.com/gene…august-1-2008/ [...]