Found active tracking device after deleting WP SEO months ago

  • Resolved Bluebird Blvd.

    (@bluebird-blvd)


    11 years, 4 months ago

    Dear Yoast,

    After trying out several different configurations of your plugin, I decided that this WP SEO by Yoast was not for me. That’s totally fine— I know you work really hard to make functional plug-ins that people use all the time.

    What’s not fine is that today, I found an active tracking device (yoast_tracking) in my current cron jobs. Again, I deleted your plugin in its entirety at least two months ago.

    According to my records, your tracking device has been actively tracking data on my site all this time. I’ve taken a screenshot of the page showing that I’ve finally deleted your tracking device that includes the date, the time, et. al. and shows, also, other current cron jobs and their working processes.

    Let me state clearly that I am not technically savvy enough to know whether the active Yoast tracking device I found was accidentally left behind after I completely removed your plugin, or whether it was intentionally left behind by your plugin.

    I’m really hoping for both of our sakes that the left-behind tracking device was some technical one-off accident due to some something-or-other having to do with my site and not an intentional or accidental regular occurrence for anyone who checks the box that allows your plugin to track data anonymously for the purposes of improving your free plugin… only to find that your tracking device is still collecting data even after the plug-in is removed.

    Here’s my problem, Yoast— should I ever consider using one of your plugins again, I will be second-guessing the possibility of any Yoast leaving unwanted active tracking devices on my blog whether or not I continue to use it. I’m really, really unhappy about today’s discovery, and I really, really hope you can figure out a way for this to never happen again, regardless of the technical circumstances.

    Best wishes,

    Courtenay Bluebird.

    https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/wordpress-seo/

Viewing 8 replies - 1 through 8 (of 8 total)

  • Sounds like it was accidentally left behind.

    Anyways, since you deleted the plugin, no tracking has been taking place as the function the cron job tries to call no longer exists and therefore cannot be executed.

    So… much ado about nothing ?

    Thread Starter Bluebird Blvd.

    (@bluebird-blvd)

    Is there anything else that WordPress SEO by Yoast might have “accidentally left behind”?

    …every why hath a wherefore. —(from The Comedy of Errors, Shakespeare.)

    *Correction: Forgot to add “the” to The Comedy of Errors.

    Absolutely ??

    Plugins are supposed to ‘clean up’ after themselves, but most don’t do this very thoroughly.

    WP SEO currently does remove most of it’s settings, but does not remove the meta data it may have added to posts, taxonomies and users.

    This kind of plugin behaviour is very common. It allows users to retain user-entered data to be used again if/when the plugin would be re-installed and/or when another (SEO) plugin would be installed, they could import this data.

    Whether this is right or wrong is something else altogether. Anyways, once the plugin is uninstalled, the plugin itself can’t do anything with the data anymore.

    P.S.: The tracking scheduling thing should be fixed in the next version, see this pull request.

    Thread Starter Bluebird Blvd.

    (@bluebird-blvd)

    Thank you, JRF! Your explanation of why and how plugins typically leave data behind is incredibly useful.

    Furthermore, I appreciate your taking the time to unpack this question of mine completely, and I am really appreciative of your disclosure about your plugin’s tracking schedule issue and its current pull request.

    JRF, I am seriously impressed. Thanks for this! I learned something new today because of you!

    Just to be clear: it’s not “my” plugin. It’s Yoast’s. I just contribute to it once in a while.

    @bluebird: maybe this plugin can help you.

    https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/options-optimizer/

    ??

Viewing 8 replies - 1 through 8 (of 8 total)
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