Bengo's dashboard

The site map bug shows no sign of being repaired in WebMaster Tools, and the warnings from Google since 3/20 have grown more severe, referencing random pages that have been given 301 redirects throughout the site. Meanwhile, PageRank for all my sites has fallen to 0, or in one case, 2. I am familiar with PR management issues and do not have reason to suspect an on-site cause.

As you know, I am relocating my sites, but I hoped for a more graceful exit, not one in which I had to battle the same bugs for months and letters go unanswered while strange disruptions occur. Can we do better?

Note: I searched and search a a way to submit this privately, across multiple blogs and addresses, and they only took me in circles. Regrets.

This is about problems at SynthaSite that can no longer be handled at the staff level.

Dear Vinny,

We plan to leave SynthaSite. Because many of the issues driving this decision do or will affect other users, I want to leave you with a friendly critique. I hope you will find it of value.

I will be writing on engineering trouble and unresolved issues, with the latter saved for a second letter to avoid distraction from your most urgent problem.

1. Engineering

There is compelling evidence that your setup causes disruptive events to happen in certain areas: Google Analytics, WebMaster Tools, and traffic from sites like Project Wonderful. Engineers (recruited by me from top firms) and I have isolated each element and run tests, and I have retained some of the smartest people I know in the world to assist.

Our theory is that there are problems in the sorting and interpretation of how addresses are received. Specifically, an engineer I retained reports:

"The best thing for Synthasite to do is to consolidate the www.example.com and example.com stats into a single stream of statistics. That's easy for traditional hosts to do because Apache's logging setup bases the target log on the vhost target, not on the request URI (which actually makes it difficult to separate the stats out if you need to do that for some reason), but it sounds like Synthasite is just looking at the domain and doing a strict string match, which is definitely the wrong way to do it.

"At the very least they should be treating www.whatever and whatever as equivalent. The easiest way for them to do that is to always strip out the "www." in the host name."

Without access to the details of your operation, our suggestions must be reviewed by someone who understands both, as a way to confirm or eliminate our theory.

The negative effects we tentatively link to this problem show up first with Google Analytics and WebMaster Tools, and ad sites like Project Wonderful.
Simply put, data reported by SynthsaSite is wrong, and clashes with the data from these other sources. Consider the implications of telling all your users that their analytics data is not reliable. It would seem to be a PR nightmare.

For example, an ad on Project Wonderful reporting 50 hits via their analytics might show only 3 hits on GA (after making suitable adjustments for period and type of data gathered and type of code used, etc.). While some difference is reasonable, a difference of this magnitude is not. But it's common.

We spent several months looking at PW and GA and puzzling before we realized they are the symptoms, not the cause. The owner of PW was extremely concerned and spent numerous hours on this.The cause seems to be faulty reading and reporting at SynthaSite. Comparison with non-SynthaSite GA sites using PW did not duplicate the huge differences in data that we had.

The consequences for this might be disheartening for a small site, but for a large site, they are severe. After cleaning up a few small problems on my sites, we found that a clean test shows huge misrepresentations of data. Recalculation shows I lost 55% of my traffic, 65% of my ad results and untold effects on various GA subreports. I was spending big money on ads and relying on false data to judge their effectiveness. Having isolated the problem and using ad data more carefully, it's clear that I wasted at least two grand on non-performing ads.

As knowledge spread that others, not just me, were losing their WebMaster Tools data and getting anomalies, the common thread was the URL suffix from Synthasite conflicting with the selected suffix by the WT user. As recently as yesterday, your help desk was articulating alternate explanations to clients.

I can't speculate why SynthaSite would make the obsolete "www" the default, but perhaps there are reasons.

I'm sure you appreciate that we feel we have wasted a year of our life with your firm and must rebuild completely. What stings is we had such high hopes, and are disappointed, insulted and disgusted.

Once, people teased us for using SS, but I could see the potential of it being the next WordPress, and more, and said, "Just you wait." Luckily, my friends feel too badly for us now to laugh.

Another comment from our end: "My main issue with www. is just that it's inelegant and a terrible vestige of bygone eras when the web was an experimental academic project, with sites actually having a specific dedicated webserver. These days, since most domains are used solely for web hosting, and in fact most websites don't even have a dedicated server to begin with, calling out "www" specifically is just a dumb bit of miscellani which should have disappeared long ago.

"The least-crappy handling I've ever seen from a major shared-hosting provider is Dreamhost, which allows you to do one of the following:

- www.example.com always redirects to example.com (good idea)
- example.com always redirects to www.example.com (bad idea)
- www.example.com and example.com work exactly the same (terrible idea)

"Having different domains acting the same leads to all sorts of weirdness, especially when it comes to cookies; a cookie for www.example.com is not portable to example.com, for example, and many web application platforms explicitly set the cookie domain (this is why if you go to just projectwonderful.com you can't actually successfully log in, because it's trying to set the cookie for www.projectwonderful.com).

"Distinct subdomains should lead to distinct sites or services or whatever.

"And of course, most external applications are a bit odd about how they catalog subdomains, and there are so many weird hacks out there which try to do the right thing and usually fail miserably. It's not guaranteed that example.com/foo.html and www.example.com/foo.html will be the same page, and if someone prefers the aesthetics of a minimal URL, forcibly adding a www onto any sort of collated stats can be rather upsetting."

2. Unresolved issues of significance

This is an extensive list. I have learned that any list with minor items tends to distract attention from major items, so I will forward this in the future.

3. Attitude

I was going to let this slide. Then I checked my mail today.

There is a "Synthasite attitude." This unsolicited letter is the perfect example:

Hey Bengo,

Thanks as always for keeping us on our toes and demanding excellence and accountability. It is thanks to customers like yourself that we can continue improving our product.

Don't be mistaken - this place is crawling with SynthaSite engineers, which makes it unnecessary for community support to represent anything to us.

Lisa

"We need you, but we really don't." That's it in a sentence. And yet, four months of warnings about profound structural issues have gone unaddressed.

I have 700+ pages of web sites with you. I bet the average is more like five or ten. There is time before the problem blooms on the small sites, but how will you handle it if it blooms on 100 sites, and the media take an interest? Feel free to prove us wrong, but at least resolve whatever the cause is before people get hurt.

Our main SS sites are
psychedelictreehouse.com
lilnyet.com
scratchinpostcomics.com

I would appreciate if some angry staffer doesn't cripple them before we find a new home.