Enable Google Analytics (2)

[Cobra-Bitcoin]

Adds Google Analytics to the site so that visitor numbers and behavior can be accurately measured. This is necessary as Bitcoin.org is currently looking to work with new advertising partners to help fund the site's expenses.

This addresses some of the concerns raised in #1077. The following has been done:

• A formal privacy policy has been written.
• A cookie disclaimer is shown to visitors as per the EU cookie law.
• Visitors that have Do Not Track enabled are not tracked with Google Analytics.

A stripped down version of https://github.com/silktide/cookieconsent2 has been used to display the cookie disclaimer.

If you are personally concerned about Google Analytics being on the site, I recommend you switch on Do Not Track or you install a browser extension that prevents Google Analytics from tracking you.

[saivann]

Previous PR:
#1077

If you are personally concerned about Google Analytics being on the site, I recommend you switch on Do Not Track or you install a browser extension that prevents Google Analytics from tracking you.

I think none of the people who commented on your other PR were thinking of themselves :( But rather they were thinking of bitcoin.org's visitors.

I'm not a lawyer, but you're including GPL-licensed content and not everything in this repo is open-source, maybe there is some legal issues here?

Regarding translations, you need to keep using the following syntax to allow the content to eventually be translated, otherwise it'll remain English only (and it's almost a formal need to provide translations for the legal content in all languages we support).

Otherwise @wilbns made an interesting suggestion in the other PR if you really want stats to be enabled. Would be interesting to consider Piwik.

[jrmithdobbs]

Fuck no.

On Oct 12, 2015, at 13:46, Saïvann Carignan notifications@github.com wrote:

Previous PR:
#1077

If you are personally concerned about Google Analytics being on the site, I recommend you switch on Do Not Track or you install a browser extension that prevents Google Analytics from tracking you.

I think none of the people who commented on your other PR were thinking of themselves :( But rather they were thinking of bitcoin.org's visitors.

I'm not a lawyer, but you're including GPL-licensed content and not everything in this repo is open-source, maybe there is some legal issues here?

Regarding translations, you need to keep using the following syntax to allow the content to eventually be translated, otherwise it'll remain English only (and it's almost a formal need to provide translations for the legal content in all languages we support).

Otherwise @wilbns made an interesting suggestion in the other PR if you really want stats to be enabled.

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[jrmithdobbs]

To expand: I'd rather personally pay a year of bitcoin.org hosting / cloud flare than see this merged. Please provide operational cost information if you're going to pretend this is necessary.

[Cobra-Bitcoin]

@saivann Thanks for your feedback. I always thought everything in this repo was open-source. Could you let me know the stuff we're using that isn't?

@jrmithdobbs I'd rather not have the site be dependent on charity. Operational costs also aren't set in stone. There's a lot of situations where the site may urgently need more money (emergency DDoS prevention, legal problems, and more).

In this pull request, the cookie disclaimer links to the privacy policy where we publicly explain what we collect and why. How to opt-out is also very clearly explained. We make a fair assumption that the user doesn't mind being tracked if they have Do Not Track switched off. Privacy conscious users will switch it on and not be tracked. What is the problem here? We're only tracking users that implicitly agree to being tracked.

@saivann I'll look into Piwik. Thank you.

[saivann]

@Cobra-Bitcoin Ideally you'd check every file header and COPYING file (but I know this is huge), me and David previously did all the work of ensuring everything was licensed correctly. We have a few images for the /innovation page that are stock pictures (which I'd always wanted to replace by images under a free license, but this remained low priority on my list). There is also several icons logos and screenshots for which I hardly know if we can really set a license, these usually have a very broad COPYING file:

The files inside this folder may be subjected to copyright restrictions. The
use of these materials is not permitted unless otherwise specified by their
copyright owner.

[harding]

Although I respect that it is the domain owners choice about how the site is funded, I would prefer to accept charity (from reasonable sources) or term-limited sponsorships (again, from reasonable sources) over advertising income.

I doubt I would've begun contributing for free 18 months ago if the site had conspicuous advertising at that time. I would've assumed that a site with advertising revenue could pay to hire writers in a way that a site saying "A community website sponsored by the Bitcoin Foundation" could not. In this way, I think advertising weakens the open source spirit that the site has maintained so far. However, again, I do think that this decision is up to the domain owners.

[saivann]

FWIW, I've already said that by email previously, and while I appreciate the efforts, I also find ads to be the least desirable choice in general. I certainly hope I am wrong, but I anticipate issues.

[Cobra-Bitcoin]

@saivann I could remove all the images from the innovation page then, while suitable alternatives are found to replace the stock images. The page doesn't look too bad without the images anyway. Logos and branding are covered by trademark law, so I don't think they can even be licensed with a conventional software license.

These ads won't be permanently running, and it's not been established if this is something we're going to continue to do. The site has it's hosting already prepaid for quite a while, and this seemed like a good time to experiment with a different approach to generating revenue for the site.

My problem with "accepting charity" is that it makes the site dependent on an organization with different goals and priorities from those of the site. They may be concerned with things like raising brand awareness or increasing profits. Over time expenses may increase to the point where the site can't survive without support from this organization because they're the only ones willing to cover our costs.

Another important point is making sure we have enough money to pay for large emergency expenses. This is the point where organizations sponsoring the site become unreliable as they probably won't be willing to provide the funding to cover such an expense. Many organizations in the Bitcoin industry are still not well established and it's often hard to judge how financially healthy they are. I really think Bitcoin.org is better off being completely independent here, even if that means we have to run ads once in a while.

I'll merge this once I've resolved the issues with licensing and translation syntax. Thanks to everyone for the feedback.

[jrmithdobbs]

So now there's not actually a current need? I think the downsides of remote code execution for visitors outweigh any ephemeral possible future funding issues.

On Oct 14, 2015, at 07:45, Cøbra notifications@github.com wrote:

@saivann I could remove all the images from the innovation page then, while suitable alternatives are found to replace the stock images. The page doesn't look too bad without the images anyway. Logos and branding are covered by trademark law, so I don't think they can even be licensed with a conventional software license.

These ads won't be permanently running, and it's not been established if this is something we're going to continue to do. The site has it's hosting already prepaid for quite a while, and this seemed like a good time to experiment with a different approach to generating revenue for the site.

My problem with "accepting charity" is that it makes the site dependent on an organization with different goals and priorities from those of the site. They may be concerned with things like raising brand awareness or increasing profits. Over time expenses may increase to the point where the site can't survive without support from this organization because they're the only ones willing to cover our costs.

Another important point is making sure we have enough money to pay for large emergency expenses. This is the point where organizations sponsoring the site become unreliable as they probably won't be willing to provide the funding to cover such an expense. Many organizations in the Bitcoin industry are still not well established and it's often hard to judge how financially healthy they are. I really think Bitcoin.org is better off being completely independent here, even if that means we have to run ads once in a while.

I'll merge this once I've resolved the issues with licensing and translation syntax. Thanks to everyone for the feedback.

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[saivann]

@Cobra-Bitcoin Replacing the GPL code, or asking a lawyer seems more simple and less risky to me than dropping (good) content and hoping the remaining logos / screenshots can be legally used alongside GPL licensed code.

FWIW, our experience so far with charities or sponsorship didn't present the problems you outlined. The Foundation didn't involve in the day-to-day decisions of the website, nor put pressure for changing a long term agreement for their own profit. So while possible, I think these are theoretical issues, which are not so likely to happen with any serious organization. Edit: If expenses keep growing without control, I think we have a problem on our side.

Regarding emergency expenses, any sponsorship of a similar amount than what we had previously would give us this freedom too (our long term hosting is a good example, we have more than 6 months (~3 500$) of server hosting paid in advance although the sponsorship has ended).

We haven't discussed this, but it is also important for you to consider that keeping money over years brings up taxation issues and may require additional paperwork. Are you prepared for this (e.g. I think theymos previously alluded to creating a bitcoin.org organization)?

In general, although it's a nice to have, I don't see huge likeliness for emergency issues, we already have a good DDoS protection, and very strong DDoS would probably always be too expensive if they persist no matter what funding we have. The most credible point I can think of is legal risk.

[saivann]

@Cobra-Bitcoin Merged?

How about Piwik and GPL licensing issues, can you at least provide an update on those topics?

Regarding the workflow, it's usually important to fix all Travis-CI build issues before merging, I see that you provided fixes only a few hours after the merge. This makes me wonder if you noticed your PR did fail to build - although you should usually receive email notifications from Travis-CI.

[Cobra-Bitcoin]

I looked a lot into Piwik. There are two different ways we could use Piwk, either "self-hosted" or "cloud-hosted". The cloud hosted version is similar to Google Analytics because Piwik process all the data for you through their servers. So that particular option didn't seem like an interesting alternative. Their self-hosted version however allows you to set up your tracking infrastructure on your own server(s). I spotted some potential problems though:

• We would need to get a new server and install Piwik on it, and then use this server for tracking. Because installing Piwik on the bitcoin.org main server would be a security risk.
• We have direct access to all the data collected. Unlike Google Analytics which only gives us numbers and not anything that could personally identify a user. This requires a more complicated privacy policy and new security measures.
• Advertisers have limited guarantees about the validity of the data. It's possible (and quite easy in fact) for us to modify Piwik's database and make it display whatever statistics we want.
• We would have much less sophisticated spam detection available, and we would have to manage our own spam blacklists.
• A third party would still have access to all the data collected (our hosting provider). Any vulnerability in Piwik (written in PHP) would also risk exposing all this data.

I spoke to a lawyer about the GPL licensing issues. His verdict was that it's still a grey area, and that the nature of our specific project makes licensing issues like this difficult. But in a non-conventional software project such as this with multiple licenses across different files and sub-components, some licensing grey areas are to be expected. It doesn't seem like the GPL licensed code is interacting directly with the screenshots, and the logos fall more so under trademark law than they do copyright law, so I'm fine with some uncertainty here.

It's also important to keep in mind that a lot of our use of copyrighted material(s) likely falls under "fair use". The fair use limitation if it stands up could resolve some of the grey area issues with the licensing. Bitcoin.org largely exists to educate the world about Bitcoin, and referencing fair use in the context of educational purposes seems like a solid argument. I know it would be better to not have these issues, but the cookie disclaimer we're using is very well designed and the alternatives aren't that good from a UX point of view. It also works really well on mobile.

The Foundation was a non-profit. My criticism of accepting charity was largely focused on accepting it from individuals or for-profit businesses. I don't think there are any non-profit organizations in the Bitcoin industry that could provide us with sponsorship money, and so our next sponsor would likely be a for-profit organization. They have a very different mentality, goals, and way of looking at things than the Foundation did.

I remember back when we were considering a new sponsor and I spoke with businesses trying to get them to sponsor the site. I noticed they were more shrewd about the placement of their logo, the cost of sponsorship, and the duration. They viewed the sponsorship as a business move and not as a way to help the community. So I would be careful about letting our experiences with a non-profit determine our expectations from businesses.

I wasn't receiving any email notifications about build errors. It could be an issue with my email provider. This is also my first time making changes to this project, so I'm still figuring out the workflow. I'll be more careful next time. Thanks.

[saivann]

Thanks for providing the details.

[ABISprotocol]

Why is this merged? It strikes me based on what I have been reading that this never should have been approved. I would like to see this merged item be reversed. NACK to Google analytics. I also concur that it's not consistent with the GPL. "I spoke to a lawyer?" Geez. Come on.

Edit: ( cc @saivann ~ @harding ) I don't know really how pull requests are done in this repository, but it strikes me that maybe the person authoring and being a proponent of the pull request shouldn't be the one merging the commit, for obvious reasons that this then results in bypassing of desirable community consensus. And again, I think this merge needs to be undone.