Hello, 

What are the problems you see with the beacon being blocked when it comes to extracting value from data?

In most instances what we look when deriving insights are ratios. For example: "of the people that saw the red link how many clicked it". In this scenario, with an adequate sample sizes, insights can be extracted without any issues. 

>Is it reasonable to say that ad blockers should not be blocking EventLogging (since it's just an internal logging system)?
Addblockers prevent requests to beacons, them being used for internal stats or otherwise (ad serving) so yes, it is pretty reasonable. A beacon does not necessarily imply it is used for adds [1]


>If the answer to #1 is "yes", could we change the URL that EventLogging uses so that it is no longer blacklisted by ad blockers
Any url we use it is likely to be blacklisted by blockers that use lists in the absence of it being explicitly whitelisted. So, a naming change will have just a short lived effect.

Another way to proceed is the opposite: whitelist the url so it is not blocked by the blockers that -like adblocker- rely on lists. Now (since not all blockers work with lists. Example: Privacy Badger) that is by no means a 100% guarantee that data would not be blocked. 

Thanks,

Nuria


[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_beacon

On Tue, Sep 22, 2020 at 10:50 AM Ryan Kaldari <rkaldari@wikimedia.org> wrote:
As mentioned at T251464, EventLogging is currently blocked by EasyPrivacy (a popular add-on for ad blocking software) due to EventLogging sending its data to a URL that includes the blacklisted string "beacon/event". In some cases, this makes it difficult or impossible for us to get the analytics data we need to make product decisions, e.g. T240697. Two questions:
  1. Is it reasonable to say that ad blockers should not be blocking EventLogging (since it's just an internal logging system)?
  2. If the answer to #1 is "yes", could we change the URL that EventLogging uses so that it is no longer blacklisted by ad blockers?

--
Ryan Kaldari (they/them)
Director of Engineering, Product Department
Wikimedia Foundation
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