whos.amung.us blog

Kaspersky False Postive

Christopher — Thu, 10 May 2012 14:39:49 UTC

We've had a few users report that their Kaspersky anti virus software is throwing a false positive on our site, we've contacted Kaspersky and should have things resolved shortly. As always are services are completely safe and this is nothing more than a false alarm.

Trend Micro False Positive

Christopher — Thu, 03 May 2012 14:50:27 UTC

Some Trend Micro products are incorrectly identifying some of our URLs as dangerous when they are in fact completely safe of course.

We have been in contact with Trend Micro and the problem should be resolved shortly. In the mean time you can safely add an exception for any of URLs.

It's been resolved, thanks to some swift work by the team at Trend Micro

New Design

Christopher — Sat, 07 Apr 2012 08:15:19 UTC

Hi all, as you've probably noticed we've released a new design to the site that we are very excited about!

We've tried to keep the general positioning and layout of the components on the stats pages in the same general locations as before so that it is still presented in a similar format to your previous stat pages.

Now, we know change can be hard and some users will not like certain aspects of the new interface - in that case we want to hear from you! Let us know what does and doesn't work for you, if there is something we can do to make your experience with whos.amung.us better we want to know! Drop us an email and we'll chat.

Over the next week or two we'll probably make some tweaks to the interface to further improve it, but shouldn't be anything too major.

Running a Wordpress Site and Suddenly See our Widget on Your Site?

Christopher — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 07:27:32 UTC

If you are suddenly seeing our widget on your Wordpress site when you are not expecting to see it, please let us know by contacting us through http://whos.amung.us/contact/general/.

There appears to be a Wordpress plugin that is adding our widget along with whatever the plugin itself is doing and it is catching some users off guard when they suddenly see the widget appearing.

We do not offer an official Wordpress plugin at the moment, but there are 3rd party ones out there that provide an easy way to add our widget to Wordpress blogs, we don't officially support them but will do our best to do so of course.

Multiple Private Pro Stat Pages

Christopher — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 18:07:55 UTC

Quick update has been made to address an issue some users were having where they could not open multiple private stat pages in their accounts - only one would update at a time. This has been fixed and you can now have all your stat pages open at once if you like and have them all update as expected.

Leap Year Bug Fix

Christopher — Fri, 02 Mar 2012 14:25:14 UTC

Some users reported their charts were displaying all zeros for March 1, 2012, but all others were OK. Turned out to be a leap year issue and we've fixed the problem for everyone, if you experience any other errors just let us know.

Facebook and Profile Tracking

Christopher — Tue, 28 Feb 2012 13:28:07 UTC

Every once and a while we need to remind everyone of this: we do not, nor have we ever offered a tool to see 'who has visited your Facebook profile' and we never will. Not only that, but given Facebook's (excellent) security model, it is not possible for any 3rd party system to determine who has visited your profile.

If you see any Facebook app claiming to allow you to do this it is most likely a scam of some sort.

Minor Pro Updates

Christopher — Fri, 24 Feb 2012 17:46:12 UTC

We've pushed live a few minor updates to Pro (nothing compared to what is coming! :). They consist mainly of some small bug fixes and adding some date formatting options.

Follow us to keep in the loop!

Christopher — Wed, 22 Feb 2012 22:14:43 UTC

If you want to know the latest going ons around whos.amung.us, follow us on Twitter and Facebook to hear the latest and receive invitations to beta features!

Seeing Tab Widgets Everywhere?

Christopher — Sun, 19 Feb 2012 21:45:39 UTC

Seeing the red tab widget on the side of your browser on every page you visit? If so please let us know at http://whos.amung.us/contact/general/ so we can take appropriate action.

Censorship, revisited.

Christopher — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 17:16:09 UTC

We're leaving our logo censored a bit longer than the 'official' day of action that occurred on Jan 18th. The threat of overreaching censorship that could change the very fabric of the Internet we all know and love is still very real.

Please join us in continuing the fight to make everyone aware of exactly what these proposed US bills (and others like it around) could mean for the Internet.

Educate yourself and others: http://americancensorship.org

Historical Data Blanks

Christopher — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 16:26:13 UTC

Hi Guys,

As some of you noticed your historical data may have been blank for a brief period of time today, it will be back shortly if not already.

We lost network connectivity between some important machines and had to run on backup systems for a few minutes, while we transitioned things over to work around the lost connectivity. This has happened before and we (and our datacenter) are taking steps to prevent it in the future, those changes should be complete within a week or two and will really help things out as we prepare to launch a ton of new features in the very near future.

Thanks for bearing with us during this brief glitch and don't forget to follow us on Twitter, we try to post updates in real time there: Twitter Feed.

Internet Censorship

Christopher — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 00:00:00 UTC

You may have noticed that a number of your favorite sites are not available today as they voluntarily black out their sites in protest of the SOPA and PIPA bills racing through the US Congress. We have joined in by censoring our logo for this day of action.

These bills (and others like them both in the US and abroad) have the power to drastically alter the very fabric of the Internet. Sites could be taken offline for simply linking to other sites.

This is not the way to attack the problem of piracy or anything else governments deem a 'problem'. We (as do many others) believe it would be a huge mistake to allow anything of this nature to become law. The Internet needs to remain free and open and no one should have the power to alter that.

Even though this is a US bill, if these bills were to pass, the effects would be far reaching and global - don't think you would not be affected if you are not a US citizen. Furthermore, there is talk of SOPA and PIPA being shelved, that is great - but that doesn't mean they won't come back in some other form.

If you have a website (and even if you don't) please consider joining in this day of action to make your voice heard. Read more about what you can do at americancensorship.org and one of the few non blacked out English Wikipedia pages. Tucows also has a great description of things over at their blog, as does Google - give them all a read.

Email Inquiries

Christopher — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 18:47:20 UTC

We strive to respond to all of our user inquires as quickly as possible and I have to say we do a pretty good job with emails being answered in mere minutes a lot of the time and at most a few hours - providing top notch customer service is something we pride ourselves on.

So on that note, if you have emailed us and not received a response, make sure you check your spam or junk mail folder as sometimes our responses to you can end up there. In the same vein, if your spam filter is setup to auto delete messages or not deliver them to you at all then it is possible you may not get a response from us. If you have any sort of system like that you may want to explicitly whitelist whos@amung.us or any amung.us email address.

Enjoy the new year!

Tab Widget Mobile Browser Changes

Christopher — Sat, 17 Dec 2011 23:26:20 UTC

Hi All,

We've made some changes to the way the red tab widget is handled in mobile browsers. The tab widget being the one that can be positioned at a fixed location along the browser edge of course, instead of being positioned at a specific location within the page content (like our other widgets).

After consulting with mobile users we've found the number one feedback issue is that in some mobile browsers the tab takes up too much screen real estate when zoomed in on a specific part of a page making it hard to read the content you're interested in. So, depending on the mobile browser you are using, you may notice that the widget does not appear along the browser edge when you load a site with it installed as you may be accustomed to. This is now normal since we've removed the rendering of the widget for some specific platforms/browsers that don't handle it all that well. For you website owners, don't worry the mobile user visits are still represented in your stats.

We'll make more adjustments as we test more platforms in detail, but if you notice any problems or have any feedback, please let us know, we always want to hear from our users and do our best to accomodate everyone.

Stay tuned to our Twitter feed at http://twitter.com/whosamungus for exciting new stuff coming very very soon ;)

Switching Gear Changeout

Christopher — Mon, 24 Oct 2011 23:16:29 UTC

Our datacenter is swapping some network gear. Stats may not be available briefly, widget files will continue to be served uninterrupted.

Update: Took longer than anticipated but back to normal now.

Beta Users Wanted!

Christopher — Sun, 10 Apr 2011 23:40:41 UTC

We've got some interesting new features coming up and we need some users to help us test them out and perfect them!

If you currently use whos.amung.us on your site and want to get involved, sign up at http://whos.amung.us/beta/ and we'll get back to you when we have tester spaces available.

We Don't Have a Facebook/Twitter/etc Profile Viewer.

Christopher — Sun, 06 Mar 2011 21:17:11 UTC

Along the same lines as this post, we don't offer an app to see who visited your Twitter, Facebook, etc profile. This is not possible with the security models Facebook and Twitter have put in place, and these supposed 'profile viewer' apps are likely scams, so be careful!

Firefox Addon Update

Christopher — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 17:37:32 UTC

We've updated the Firefox addon to be compatible with Firefox 4.0, couple of other 'under-the-hood' changes to make it more efficient.

If you haven't had it automatically update in your browser, you can grab it from Mozilla at https://addons.mozilla.org/addon/whosamungus-users-online-count

'Phantom' Tab Widgets

Christopher — Sat, 12 Feb 2011 13:59:19 UTC

A few people have brought it to our attention that new 'phantom' tab widgets are now showing up on their site, and some users are mistaking this as us somehow installing widgets on their site without permission.

First of all I'd just like to say that we have absolutely zero intention of installing a widget on your site or blog without your permission, and secondly it is impossible for us to do so without access to your blog account or HTML source of your site, it just won't happen, and we, of course, have no interest in doing so, ever!

Without getting too technical, what has happened with the users who let us know there was now a widget on their site when they weren't expecting it, is that they had previously attempted to install our floating tab widget on their site, however in all cases the widget code was incorrectly installed, and left in place even after no widget was visible (The widget code needs to be placed in between the <body> </body> tags in a site or it would not have worked). We did an update to the widget code yesterday (update was only to increase efficiency and make things faster) and as an unintended side effect, incorrectly installed tab widgets now function correctly, and appear as originally anticipated. Once these 'phantom' widgets started appearing we started getting user complaints, it took us a little while to figure out what was going on but we finally got it sorted out and this is the conclusion we've come to, and verified that this is indeed the case with all complaints we have received. Basically it boils down to: incorrectly installed code on a site now works in most cases due to an update yesterday :)

If you are experiencing a tab widget now being visible on your site that wasn't previously and you want to remove it, you simply have to search the HTML code of your site for a line that looks similar (it will not be exactly the same so don't copy it to do a find and replace) to the following and delete it:

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://widgets.amung.us/tab.js"></script>

<script type=""text/javascript">WAU_tab('9qu8ltzp9ots', 'left-middle')</script>

If you are now experiencing a new tab widget and you want to keep it, please ensure that the code is located between the tags of your site HTML to ensure proper operation, if it's in the <head>> </head>, or after the body section it is incorrectly installed. Of course we have a variety of other widget styles available at http://whos.amung.us/showcase/ if you don't like the tab style.

As always, if you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us.

Happy Holidays

whos.amung.us — Sat, 25 Dec 2010 13:58:16 UTC

Happy Holidays everyone.

Thanks for your support throughout the year and keep an eye out for new features and big changes in the New Year!

Facebook App (or lack there of)

Christopher — Sun, 31 Oct 2010 13:24:18 UTC

We've had a few people ask us about a Facebook app lately, we do NOT have one available and will never ask you to fill out surveys/offers etc. So if you do encounter a 'whos.amung.us Facebook App' please remember it is NOT from us, if we ever have one we will make it directly available from our website, no where else.

Wibiya Toolbar

Christopher — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 12:52:01 UTC

If you are using our services with the Wibiya toolbar, there seems to be some intermittent problems, we are working with Wibiya to determine the problem ASAP. Normal widgets are working just fine.

Network Failure

Christopher — Sun, 12 Sep 2010 16:52:40 UTC

Greetings all, I'd just like to address the intermittent downtime we had Sept 12, 2010 from 0:00 to 16:30 PST.

We utilize datacenter services from Steadfast Networks (http://www.steadfast.net) and they are absolutely great for the most part, however during the scheduled replacement of their core routing equipment some unforseen problems occurred that lead to downtime, slowdowns, and a host of other problems. They are still working on fully repairing the network and getting the new hardware in place. We made some changes in order to mitigate as much downtime as we could and keep the site up and running as much as possible and for the most critical parts of the site. We are still running on this configuration until we get the all clear from Steadfast at which time we'll be back at 100% capacity.

I'd like to apologize to all of our users for any issues they experienced, as you know we normally have very fast response times and Steadfast is a big part of this and we will be working with them to mitigate the chances of this ever happening again.

We were keeping users up to date with any info that we could get our hands on through our Twitter account, we don't use it as much as we should but we are going to try to change that http://www.twitter.com/whosamungus

Update: There is still intermittent packet loss in the datacenter, and the source of the problem is being replaced.

Network Maintanence

whos.amung.us — Sat, 11 Sep 2010 23:14:17 UTC

We are currently undergoing major upgrades to networking hardware, there may be some minor disruptions in service while this occurs.

Maintenance

Christopher — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 22:54:54 UTC

We're doing some server maintenance, there might be a bit of downtime, but it won't be long.

Live Referrers

Christopher — Mon, 03 May 2010 13:34:39 UTC

We've had a lot of users asking for a real time list of referrers (in addition to the current historical list of referrers) to their pages, so we've added it as a Pro feature. If you have a current Pro account check the Readers section of your stats pages to see where your visitors are coming from in real time.

Brief Service Interruption

Christopher — Mon, 26 Apr 2010 16:37:56 UTC

We experienced a very brief service interruption when a change at out datacenter resulted in an error that affected our systems, backups were able to handle the site for the most part but there was a few minutes of downtime for some of our users.

Apologizes to those who were affected, no data was lost and all systems are back to normal.

Not getting email from us?

Christopher — Mon, 19 Apr 2010 16:38:14 UTC

If you're not receiving email from us, make sure amung.us is allowed to send you email in your email program or on your (ISP's) mail server.

Be sure to check the spam and bulk folder from time to time as well.

Maintenance

Christopher — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 16:43:46 UTC

We're doing some maintenance, you may notice that your stats appear or empty or not complete, this shouldn't last long at all, one hour at the absolute most.

Maintenance

Christopher — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 14:19:12 UTC

We are doing a bit of server maintenance at the moment, there should be no noticeable effects except for the possibility of some higher latency while changes are pushed out, shouldn't take long.

Update: There was a tiny bit of unexpected downtime during the maintenance, sorry about that.

PRO: Minor Updates

Christopher — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 18:41:42 UTC

Quick update to let you know we've added the ability to configure the link target in the real time list of users and pages being read on your site. A number of users were asking for the links to open in a new window so we've made it configurable in the settings page of the PRO control panel.

New Map View for PRO Users

Christopher — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 18:47:51 UTC

We've added the traditional map view as an additional view on the PRO stats pages in the map section, for those of you who were asking for the heatmap, day/night, and cluster modes to be available alongside the fully zoomable map.

whos.amung.us PRO

Guest Users Now Available for PRO Users!

Christopher — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 16:28:12 UTC

You've been asking for it and we've been listening (as we do with all suggestions of course :)

PRO users who make their stats pages private can now add additional users to their account who only have access to the stats pages with no control panel access.

You can mange these users in the Settings section of the PRO Control Panel. Currently, each site has a maximum of 2 guest users that can be assigned, but if you need more just let us know!

Stay tuned for some more updates in the very near future!

Floating Tab Widget - IE Render Error Fixed

Christopher — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 15:18:37 UTC

We've had a few complaints of the floating tab widget not displaying properly under certain circumstances in Internet Explorer. An update was just pushed out that takes care of that nasty little bug :)

DDoS Attack Again

Christopher — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 08:22:31 UTC

We are working on mitigating it as quickly as possible...

whos.amung.us Attacked

Christopher — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 06:00:32 UTC

whos.amung.us has been and continues to be the victim of a distributed denial of service attack.

The site continues to operate normally with some slightly increased response times at points. We are working to resolve this issue with our infrastructure partners, and the authorities.

whos.amung.us & Wibiya Toolbar

Christopher — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 09:53:24 UTC

We're pleased to announce that all Pro features now work with the Wibiya toolbar!

Grab the whos.amung.us (real time users) app for your toolbar today!

Pro Support Coming to Wibiya Toolbar

Christopher — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 16:47:27 UTC

We've had a lot of requests for people wanting to use their whos.amung.us Pro account with the Wibiya toolbar and we're excited to announce it is coming very soon! The updated app was released to Wibiya last Friday, they will test it to make sure everything is OK and then bring it live very shortly!

The Wibiya toolbar version for current whos.amung.us Pro users will support all Pro features including updating the count in real time and more accurate user tracking.

I'll post an update here when the new version of the whos.amung.us Wibiya app goes live (keep your fingers crossed for very shortly)!

Datacenter Router Down

Christopher — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 23:39:11 UTC

Dec 29, 2009 - 22:43 PST

Our datacenter (while normally providing us with excellent service) is experiencing a problem with one of their routers handling traffic in New York City. This is making any websites hosted in this datacenter very slow to load for users accessing them through that particular router. The network admins at the DC are working on the problem and hope to have it fixed very shortly.

Thanks for bearing with us!

We've Partnered with Wibiya

Christopher — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 00:00:00 UTC

We're excited to announce our partnership with Wibiya!

You can now use whos.amung.us in your Wibiya tool bar, you don't even need to grab a code from us, just install the app through the Wibiya control panel. of coure, if you already have a whos.amung.us widget, you can use the sitekey from your current widget code to seamlessly move your stats over to the Wibiya app.

Enjoy!

Merry Christmas!

Christopher — Fri, 25 Dec 2009 10:23:01 UTC

Thanks for another great year everyone, enjoy the holidays and get ready for even more new and exciting features in the new year.

New Widget

Bart — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 01:31:13 UTC

We have created a new widget for everyone to use. It's a floating tab which can be positioned 9 different ways. Grab it from our homepage!

New Extension for Chrome

Bart — Thu, 10 Dec 2009 16:43:38 UTC

We have just published a Google Chrome extension. Click the screenshot to get it!

Updates About to Happen!

Christopher — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 16:01:52 UTC

Hang on, we're just about to do the update we posted the other day since it got postponed.

Updates completed!

Upgrades!

Christopher — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 09:31:08 UTC

Hi Everybody,

We'll be doing some upgrades later today (around the mid afternoon in the Pacific time zone) to improve the efficiency of our services. Specifically this will concern maps, so you may see your maps act strangely for some time this afternoon, but don't worry all your map pins are safe and will return once the upgrades are done.

We don't anticipate any downtime but there is a small chance it could occur, but it won't be long we promise.

Thanks everybody!

We've Partnered with Tynt

Christopher — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 00:00:00 UTC

We're excited to announce that we've partnered with Tynt to bring you even more stats!

You'll notice on your stats dashboard, if you are using our javascript based widgets, a listing of text and images that people have copied off of your website. If content is leaving your site, how are you benefiting from that? Tynt allows you to add attribution links (among other features!) to content leaving your site to link back to your site, giving you credit for your work, and helps with SEO to boot!

Sign up for a fully featured Tynt account now and capitalize on the content that is leaving your site right now.

Brief Network Outage

Christopher — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 13:37:50 UTC

We just had a brief network outage of a couple minutes at our datacenter, we're investigating its cause (appears to be upstream) and ensuring all systems are functioning properly.

Apologizes for any inconveniences and thanks for your patience.

Comodo False Positive

Christopher — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 00:38:05 UTC

Comodo anti-virus is picking up part of our widget code as a false positive and we are in the process of remedying this situation with them. This is similar to what happened with Kaspersky and F-Secure about a month ago, both of whom verified it was a false positive. We are looking at ways to modify the code to prevent this in the future.

Everything is OK, and the content of the code is of course fine.

100 Billion Widgets Served!

Bart — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 00:50:27 UTC

Today we have served our 100 billionth widget. That's 100,000,000,000 since we started whos.amung.us just over two years ago!

Another interesting tidbit of information is that during peak times we track 1 million concurrent users across all participating websites. So take that little widget you have on your site, add everyone else's and they add up to 1,000,000 online readers!

Thanks for making whos.amung.us so popular. :)