I'm personally very irritated by sponsor hosted banners. I see the point from the sponsor's end, they can see CTR for a banner on a scale one webmaster just can't...and some like SPA cash publish each banner's CTR, which is very helpful to me in selecting which ones to download and serve from my own server :D

The major points, including no control over banners changing, other people's servers going down, and the rest of the risks have already been stated so I'll only say I agree with all these points.

If I had the skills to develop my own stats tracking software I'd still buy the Wusage $295 unlimited package and spend my time writing commercial scripts to sell :) In any case, with the multiple stats programs I've used over the years, including webalizer (which sucks, granted) urchin and awstats, none of them set cookies, thus I fail to see how any stats package MUST set cookies as a result of its existence.

Beyond that, I don't like listing sites that throw popup warnings at my surfers, even if it's only the surfers who don't accept any cookies. That's the biggest thing for me on the cookie issue. My surfers should not get warnings from their browser when visiting sites that I list. Period.

UW put it best, "Free sites are four static pages. Why must people complicate this?"

I just spent almost 3 weeks cleaning up my LL. If you saw some of the things that I came across you might understand better.

I made a really long post explaining about cookies and tracking, but I thought that posting it will most probably make me look stupid, so MadMax (and anybody else) if you're interested, please send me a PM and I'll gladly explain what I'm talking about here...

-- Andrew

Everybody has a point from where he's right for himself, which is why I don't blame people (anymore) for doing this or that, but again - everybody decides how to work and I would feel really stupid if any of my sites get rejected because of cookies - that's all.

My current pet peeve is people who redirect 1 pic to somewhere else, it's way too common |satan|