Outage in the "Plausible" integration?

[liliakai]

In the last week or so, our site traffic as reported in Plausible.io appears to have dropped to nearly zero, while the site Insights seen in Gitbook itself show normal traffic levels. This leads me to believe there is an issue with the Plausible integration. I've tried re-installing it on my organization and site, but it seemed to have no effect.

Are there any other steps I can try to fix or troubleshoot this issue? Have there been any recent updates to the integration or Plausible itself that might explain this change?

[addisonschultz]

Hi @liliakai - thank you so much for pointing this out - and apologies for the disruption. I’ve made some updates and tested and it should be working now. Please let me know if you still have issues!

[liliakai]

Still having this issue.

[addisonschultz]

The fix that was shipped was the tracking won’t happen until the cookie banner is accepted - Can you hard refresh, and make sure the cookie banner appears on your site? You can try in an incognito browser as well.

I’m seeing the cookie banner on my send when I visit your site but want to make sure you check this

[liliakai]

I do see a cookie banner in incognito. Slight uptick in traffic stats as well but still far below the numbers in the site Insights.

[addisonschultz]

Okay - good to hear that it’s working. That being said, there is normally going to be a discrepancy between the two - GitBook’s own analytics are treated as essential data — they’re just used to keep the product running and give basic insights, so no cookie banner is needed.

Third-party tools, on the other hand, are optional and share data with other companies, which is why they require explicit consent, meaning if it’s not accepted, it won’t be able to track the session

[liliakai]

The point of using Plausible is that it is cookieless and privacy-protecting. I understand youʻre sending data to a third party, but most sites simply disclose this in a privacy policy. Why is the explicit opt-in required here?

[addisonschultz]

Thank you for also brining this to our attention @liliakai - we did an audit of all of our analytics integrations, and it was overlooked the information provided by Plausible and at https://plausible.io/blog/google-analytics-cookies

I’ve opened up a PR to revert this and discuss with my teammates. Apologies again for the disruption!

You can track the PR here: GitbookIO/integrations#960