Love the plugin, one question

Thanks a lot Barnez. Let me look into this with the developers next week, it takes a while because we’re currently overloaded with plugin requests and working on new features.

Thanks for considering this, and I understand you are busy other projects. I’ll keep an eye out here for any developments.

Hi Barnez, we had a look, our plugin doesn’t make any unnecessary calls. Those calls must be made from other plugins you have installed.

Hi socialdude, I stand humbly corrected and apologise for any incorrect assertion about your plugin.

The difficulty I had is that when deactivating individual plugins the 15 or so call vanished when I deactivated your plugin. I have tried this morning deactivating ALL plugin (which removed the calls) and the reactivating them individually. Your plugin was clear, and the final plugin reactivation saw these calls reappear. I’ll hold my hands up here, and move my concerns to the other plugin’s forum.

Ok, no worries, thank you for letting us know!

Nope. These requests are definitely associated with this plugin. If I deactivate all plugins they stop. If I reactivate them one by one then they return a few minutes after this plugin is reactivated. I’ve had this plugin deactivated for 12 hours, and the requests have vanished. This is what I was seeing:

s7.addthis.com/static/
static.ak.facebook.com/connect/xd_arb…
b.scorecardresearch.com/
addthis.mathtag.com/red/
tags.bluekai.com/site/

Are these requests deemed as necessary calls, as I notice a similar concern raised on one of your sister plugins ?

I have this same exact problem.

Since updating to ver. 1.8, my site load time has slowed considerably, the culprit being those same calls as @barnez listed above…..sometimes the pages hang up for long enough that my bounce rate has skyrocketed.

Testing all plugins by deactivating and testing page load/calls clearly shows that USMPlus is the culprit.

I would also like an option to disable all of the tracking/reporting.

Until the developers address this, I’m switching to a different social media plugin.

Please @socialdude take another look at this issue…….a simple enable/disable option for those who don’t need tracking or reporting would be very much appreciated. We have other tools to measure social reach and numbers, all we need from THIS plugin in the easy ability to add our social icons wherever we want them.

Thanks Trisha, we’re having a look. We don’t insert any dodgy tracking or reporting of course. We suspect it’s the addthis-API we use. We’re investigating. If you deactivate the rectangle icons after/before posts, and the share-icon (with the plus on it), is it then fixed? Those functions use addthis.

@socialdude – first, thank you very much for being willing to look at this problem. I want to be clear that I DON’T think that there is anything ‘dodgy’ going on – just that the addthis-API is dramatically slowing things down. I’m sure it’s a great feature, but given that I don’t need it (and I assume at least some other users of the plugin may not either), it would just be nice to have the option to disable that feature.

To answer your questions, the ONLY place we were using it is the Widget in our Footer…..we have not (yet) implemented it on any posts or pages (but had planned to). We don’t use any counts at all, nor any of the “sharing” features (but again, had planned to) – we were just using the icons in our footer to link to our various social media accounts.

If the problem with the page hanging on the addThis-API can be solved, then we would like to use some of the other features, in particular the “sharing” functionality.

All other features of this plugin are really great – it’s just the slowness issue that keeps us from continuing to use it, and I’d love to be able to activate it again.

I agree with @trisham. The plugin is fantastic, but I have no need for additional tracking or associated requests added to the page load. The plugin is deactivated for now, but I’d be more than happy to reactivate if as suggested by TrishaM there is some kind of opt out option for the tracking code.

We investigated further and it is confirmed that the addthis-extension is the culprit. Could you please de-activate it (i.e. deselect the share-icon which allows you to share via 200 network sites, both under question 1 as well as under question 3) and let me know if the issue is fixed?

OK so I ensured that the “Share” option is deselected under question 1, but did not see any reference under Question 3.

The site is certainly loading faster now, although I noticed that it still makes a call to ‘addthis’……

Do you plan to add an option to a future plugin update to disable the tracking (and thus the call to ‘addthis’) entirely?

You use the plus-version of the plugin, right? Under question 3, where you have the option to display rectangle icons before or after posts, there is also the addthis-button. If you deselect it then no such requests should be made anymore.

Yes, we’ll replace addthis with a better solution.

Got it, and thank you!

Yes, I use the “Plus” version, and I don’t have it set to display before or after Posts (currently)…..we just use the Widget in our footer and a manual placement via shortcode on another page. We do plan to start using them after posts, but don’t plan to use tracking so we won’t need the addthis calls.

Thank you very much for such quick responses……I’ve already given the plugin a well-deserved 5-star review.
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Cool, thank you Trisha ??