socsteve

I sent this message a month ago and Camu didn’t bother responding. Basically, from reading the one star reviews and searching for “UAN SlimStat” (seeing the ridiculously unexplanatory reference to that term as the sole thing that was “fixed” in the new version), the answer is yes – he advertised his own software on users’ blogs at Christmas time and he’s used some code to share with advert websites that supposedly don’t affect us, but some users have reported big slowdowns and I know that my blog isn’t accessible from every country that people try to access it from. There is a lot of internet censorship in the USA (and I don’t advocate terrorism by the way); NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden revealed a lot about PRISM and they don’t just collect huge amounts of data without doing anything with it! [I belatedly found there was a solution: select “No” to UAN and CDN in the advanced tab of the settings

Meanwhile, he’s churned out new versions of the plugin that have sabotaged a facility that looked really good. He obviously wants to sell us the paid plugin, and the best way he could think of doing that is by getting us to upgrade to a really ropey version, and for us to need to go to the site on which he starts selling it.

When I used an earlier version, the graphics were impressive (although scroll bars didn’t work properly) – now on the Activity Log for example, it’s just plain text. And when I removed my username from the filters so that I could see if that Log was working, it didn’t show the accesses. Oh, I suppose he could have used some clever programming to prevent us from checking whether the software is working – what I do know is that before I put my username there on the earlier version, it did record my accesses from the laptop on which I am permanently logged in.

So now, the pièce de résistance, deleting all the data for no apparent reason. After deleting my data at the start of the month, despite me putting “0” in the box saying I never want it deleted. As it says in the General settings: “Next clean-up on 5 July 2014, 2:00 am. Entries logged on or before 4 July 2014 will be permanently deleted.” And I suddenly can’t load a page of mine that uses the “Shortcodes” add-on, on that very day (UK time).

Anyway, I’m obviously deactivating and deleting SlimStat, and not using PowerStats and certainly not Google Analytics (obviously based in the US and very unwise bearing in mind Google’s sharing of data with PRISM).

So does anyone know of a stats plugin that uses a user’s own database (which is used for posts and pages anyway) without contacting servers in foreign countries? All I really need is to keep track of how many users are accessing my blog, and from what countries, preferably keeping track of the popularity of the various blog posts too. It’s not rocket science – does one such stats plugin exist? Or do I have to learn PHP and mySQL and code such a plugin myself?