Where are they getting all of that information? None of it is in my profile.....and if it was it would be false anyway since that's how I roll.

What a bunch of bullshit numbers. There's no way this company can have data about certain correlations, like for example the visitors' income and ethnicity. I'm some kind of marketing guy, and let me tell you: most of these numbers you see are pure bullshit, made up to convince companies to place ads on the respective sites (or to get good pr, etc.). The only way to get reliable data about the visitors of Vogons (or any other website) would be to conduct a worldwide census (poll), and that's near-to-impossible to do in reality. I believe Nielsen is trying to do these kind of stats for websites by census, but you have to pay a lot of money to get their results, because getting, creating and analyzing the data is _very_ expensive.

Did they count Qbix' many hentai avatars?

Qbix' current avy counts for at least two females, i believe. (;

It is easier to get that kind of data than you think. Maybe not truly reliable data but useful data anyway. If just a small percentage of the people that comes here, fills out some questionnaire with some of that info, and those persons are tracked with a cookie, then the people can be identified as belonging to some groups. Assume they visit VOGONS, then jumps to some other site that reads the cookie and reads the HTTP Referer header, then you can build a somewhat accurate picture of the people that comes here.

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Yeah, that's what the guys creating these numbers say. I don't believe in that. AFAIK, a cookie can only be read by the site that created it. It is possible, in theory, that some companies work together to combine all their data about customers/users, but even then there will be a lot of room for "failure", like systematic errors, technical errors, incorrect data given by customers/visitors, and so on. Besides, in many countries it would be illegal to combine the databases. Then you have some more variables, like changing IP's and proxies, making it impossible to identify the people "behind" the session or cookie. You could roll dice, and the numbers you'd get would be as useful as the numbers from that website.

I never submit personal info. over the Internet except when I'm registering for something and I only take polls I think are funny or that I have a strong opinion about, unless I really want to know what other people think, then I'll click one choice at random.
I think I might remember something about cookies being able to be read by sites other than the one that created them, but I'm not sure; there's an option kind of like that in IE; I know there are some pretty sneaky ways of websites getting information about users, and there are probably some we don't know about yet (65,535 ports and you're secure? I don't think so).
It does say the information is sparse and those are estimates. Where did you get the infromation about Asians, I didn't see that? It also says they use DomainTools thumbnails, presumably tiny images that let them (whoever they are) observe you without anything noticeable.
Regardless, I don't trust that information at all.

> I think I might rememebr something about cookies being able to be read by sites other than the one that created them

so called tracker cookies

The trick (which I have used in this thread!!) is to create an IMG-link to a microscopic image on the trackers site. So while you have been reading this thread, you have also unknowingly left a trace at my web-server.

In this case, I don't create or read any cookie information, but I could have done it.

Note: there is no reading of a cookie from other sites. Had I added code on my webserver to create a cookie it would belong to my webserver, not to the zetafleet webserver, but it would still have allowed me to observe what you are doing here.

general_vagueness wrote:

Where did you get the infromation about Asians, I didn't see that?

From the ethnicity graph. Says we have an above-the-normal number of visits from Asians (or from Asia?).

MiniMax: OK, so now tell me what income i have, where i live, or how many people there are in my family, you super-spy. (;

My god, just read Quantcast's FAQ. Bullshit for stupid people. No "real" info, like systematics, or the number of affiliates. Just a lot of pseudo-marketing-gibberish, and some nice graphs. Lord, are people really that naive? The "glass customer" or "see-through-customer" is a dream since professional marketing has started. But even with all the technology we use today, it's impossible to do - unless you're some super-secret US agency, that is.

Just ask yourself one question: how does Quantcast know the number of visitors/visits/pageviews/whatever on VOGONS, without having a "Web Bug" (that's what we call these tracking or counting images here) or their JavaScript in the VOGONS source? It must be some kind of magic i never heard of.

ADDiCT wrote:

MiniMax: OK, so now tell me what income i have, where i live, or how many people there are in my family, you super-spy. (;

Well... Your post is timestamped 20:08. Looking in my webserver logs, I see these entries:

(stuff deleted)

Edit the post and remove/obfuscate the location info and ip before i get _really_ angry, please. And lookup "rhetorical question" in a dictionary. Your stupid http log will not show you any more info about me, and that's the point i was making, and it's valid.

It took only about two seconds to find your exact name and address via WHOIS. Would you feel comfortable if i post it?

Edit: thanks.

ADDiCT - please remember that ANY MEMBER of this forum can do exactly the same. The information I posted is something you leave behind all the time - there is nothing secret about it, so I really don't understand the anger.

ADDiCT wrote:

It took only about two seconds to find your exact name and address via WHOIS. Would you feel comfortable if i post it?

Please be my guest. And if you get any of it wrong, I will be happy to correct it here in public.

Heh... Well, i'm a bit strange when it comes to "personal data", and an IP adress is personal data IMHO. You seem to have some technical know-how, so you know the stuff that can be done with an IP. Mine's dynamic anyway, but that's not the point. Data about me should only be visible when i agree with it.

That's exactly what I'm talking about.
I see it now; the ethnicity graph and the "image"; I thought it was an incedental image and had failed to load or been blocked, I didn't know it could be done with "broken" images. (MiniMax's 2nd post, says "user image", called VOGONS-tracker.png, served by jabba.dk, if you didn't notice it, and that shows just paying attention can get you out of a lot of situations)
The point is still valid, though, that that doesn't give you income or the other stuff, although with luck there might have only been one person from the originating town on the originating ISP with that setup ("Mozilla/5.0 [oops, removed so I don't anger ADDiCT, even though that info really isn't personal]") at that time.
Like I said, though, there are probably methods we haven't heard about yet, but I still believe that info. is less than reliable because I don't think marketers would go that far to find out who people are.

I think maybe rather than polling, they tracked traffic through a router of people fetching index.php or maybe even DNS requests, and applied that statistically the same way they would apply poll results, and though you could use anonymization/proxy methods, most people don't, and a complete ending IP address is required for page and DNS requests.
just a thought
As for Asians, if their code for individualization is bad (or non-existant), Indonesia is often considered part of Asia, they may just be picking up on Kreshna Aryaguna 😉 or Qbix's avatar's "stand-out features". 🙄
Maybe it's also being influence by DosFreak, since he (apparently) has the "IQ of 6000 PE Teachers".🤣

It's probably me too

if this info is all true there's a good chance of a DOSBox-tan popping up

DOSBox-tan?

Also, I guess you didn't notice, I asked if you draw your avatars or are they public domain, and are they (or this one, or whatever) from anime?
I want to know about Qbix's avatar too.😎 😊

meow

My avatar comes from a hentai tactical RPG called Holy Beautiful Girl Squad 1 for DOS.

As for Qbix, it's Earth from Magical Drop III, however edited to have a red ribbon instead, and her third eye removed.

Do you mean a red ribbon istead of another color, or instead of nothing? 😅
and you didn't say what DOSBox-tan means
whoa, hentai tactical RPG?