Block users who block cookies -- bad idea?

[mikomido]

1. Is this not a good idea? If not, why?
2. Can this be checked without the old "cookie set, redirect, check" method? Some sort of smart check of referrers, perhaps?

[jomaxx]

I'd phrase the question the other way -- why do you feel it's necessary to do this? Are you just being a sorehead about who gets to use your site and who doesn't, or is there a compelling functional reason to require cookies?

[mikomido]

Well, they mess up stats.

[victor]

The world is an inherently messy place.

You can try to change that by changing the world (very hard) or by changing your attitude to it (possible with some effort).

So my advice is get better stats analyzers, or adjust your expectations of what stats can tell you.

If you do block all non-cookie accepters, you'll be blocking most bots, including common ones like Google's. Your stats may then drop so low that you no longer need software to analyze them.

[mikomido]

My stats are already depressingly low.

I thought Google and other SE bots had cookie support?

[piatkow]

I would guess that mikomido is using a third party hit counter service for his stats. They can be useful if you web host restricts the stats it makes available but you just have to live with the limitations.

[vincevincevince]

They shouldn't 'mess up stats' whether the stats are analysed internally or externally. In both cases, there are perfectly good IP/user-agent pairs to work with.

[jomaxx]

One of the things I've learned is that running a website is a long painful process of reluctantly letting go.

If you go down the control freak path, you'll eventually ban users who reject cookies, have their systems set to not provide page referrer info, use a browser you haven't optimized your site for, come from a country that you don't believe should have any legitimate interest in your site, etc. etc. etc. I've even seen webmasters who felt it was important to prevent anyone from entering the website from anywhere except the home page. It's never-ending. Eventually you'll be the only person you feel is truly qualified to use your own website.

IMO it's better in this case to simply acknowledge that website stats are imperfect, it's impossible to make them perfect, and the efforts to try to make them perfect won't advance your business any.

[victor]

thought Google and other SE bots had cookie support?

Sadly, not:

[google.com...]

"If features such as JavaScript, cookies, .... keep you from seeing your entire site in a text browser, then spiders may have trouble crawling it."