Hasbro Monitoring Enworld?

[Zappo]

Yup, cookies have basically nothing to do with HTML.

This I understand. Which is why I thought that for simple counting and such, no cookie is required at all. Just log the number of requests and to which IP they were sent.

Yes and no. Most people use a dial-up connection, which generally speaking changes IP every time you reconnect. Worse, the same IP will be recycled and assigned to another machine tomorrow. Even worse, it is very hard to find out what kind of connection the user has, so you don't even know if the data you're collecting is reliable. Which means that all of it is unreliable, of course. Cookies are the only way to get useful information about accesses by a specific machine.

 

[Umbran]

Yup, cookies have basically nothing to do with HTML.Yes and no. Most people use a dial-up connection, which generally speaking changes IP every time you reconnect. Worse, the same IP will be recycled and assigned to another machine tomorrow.

Yes, but are not the IP pools that the major providers use well known? If I happen to use an Earthlink dialup, it's going to show up as an IP from their pool. So, they'd get a bit of information, at least. It isn't specific information about an i9ndividual user, but it is soem demographics that can be helpful.

 

[thatdarncat]

but they can tell (roughly) where you are in the country, so what market you're in. that would give them some good marketing information right there.

 

[Darkness]

Damn, I clicked on this link hoping to see a Piratecat Action Figure sometime in the near future, but noooo...

With Removable Action Hook!

 

[Zappo]

Yes, without using cookies they can know your provider and they might figure out your approximate geographical location (though this is very unreliable). Cookies are used for tracking single computers. Advertisement companies (such as doubleclick) that host images linked to by thousands of sites can build impressively detailed databases of customer habits this way.

 

[Umbran]

Advertisement companies (such as doubleclick) that host images linked to by thousands of sites can build impressively detailed databases of customer habits this way.

Yes, but this alone suggests to me that the images on the front page don't have cookies attached to them. For one thing, collecting and analyzing such data is part of an ad agencie's stock in trade. It's what they do for a living. WotC makes games for a living. They probably aren't set up to handle such data.

Plus, much of analysis and usefulness of such data relies on you knowing where it was seen. The ads that track data are placed, so you can be sure of a few things about the target audience (like that they actually visited a particular site on days the ad ran). But the images on the wizards site seems to be open to anyone who wants to use them. These are not strategically placed ads, greatly diluting the utility of the approach.

 

[thatdarncat]

Yes, but this alone suggests to me that the images on the front page don't have cookies attached to them. For one thing, collecting and analyzing such data is part of an ad agencie's stock in trade. It's what they do for a living. WotC makes games for a living. They probably aren't set up to handle such data.

Yes, but it's not hard to collect the data and give it to a third party to analyze. Not that I'd have any knowledge of that kind of thing. Nope nope nope.

 

[Doppleganger]

I'm pretty sure Hasbro uses Hitbox/HBX (a third party service) to track surfing habits and hits across the wizards.com domain.

 

[pensiv]

WotC makes games for a living. They probably aren't set up to handle such data.

They need to make money like anyone else. I'm certain that Hasbro has a large part of their resources dedicated to compiling and analyzing market data. How would they know what games to make and sell if they don't know who is interested in what?