Luthiery Laboratories

I've been experimenting with some Gargle stuff lately, and the experience is not good.

First, as you can see, I decided to test their ad system again. So far, in exchange for trashing my website with ads, the payout has been pennies. It will take a thousand years to reach the $100 threshold at which Gargle will actually disburse funds. At least for the moment most of the ads are relevant. Half of them anyway. Years ago I tried this, and it worked pretty well for a while, and then died - they started serving up utter garbage, the revenue dropped to zero, and I ended it. I don't think anything has really changed. I tried it on two other sites, and it was a complete failure - no ads at all, although they carved out space in every page for them. After a few weeks I killed it.

The best part is, as screwed-up as their whole ad system is, there is absolutely no way to contact Gargle. What a shit company - they couldn't care less about their customers. Too bad they have most of Congress in their pocket and will never get the anti-trust action they so richly deserve. The EU occasionally fines them a few million, and they just write a check for it and go their merry way.

But there is worse:

I tried their 'Site Kit' plugin again. This is supposed to give you all sorts of statistics and insightful analysis of your web traffic. It sort-of does that, in a limited and childish way - lots of graphics and upsells, not much useful information. But after studying it for a while, I discovered its real purpose. Site Kit is a Trojan Horse. When you install Gargle code in your WordPress server, you are letting Gargle do anything they want. And there's no way to know what that is, because Site Kit is gigantic: 9.75 MB of God-knows-what.

I'm sure that much of it is just for drawing pretty graphics to amuse the children. There is a lot of 'minified' javascipt that defies analysis. There is also a custom REST interface that lets Gargle remotely execute anything they want on your server. There are hundreds of php files, and maybe half a million lines of code. They could hide anything in there. There is just no telling what you are letting them load into your website. And it changes with updates all the time. Luckily, Gargle is totally benign - we all know that.

But it gets even worse:

Site Kit has few controls accessible to the user/administrator, and those few are well-hidden. But that doesn't matter, because they don't actually do anything. I found that Site Kit was splattering ads ( or making empty holes for them ) all over my websites, especially at the very top where I definitely don't want them. And NOTHING will turn that off. Nothing. Of course, there is a setting to turn off 'Auto Ads', and it has no effect. Gargle is not going to let you do that. The only way to gain control over Site Kit is to get rid of it. I hope.

My experience with Gargle software in general is that it is terrible. They have all the money in the world, and can't seem to hire any decent programmers. No, that's not right. Their programmers are doing exactly what Gargle wants, which is generally not in your best interests!

At least Adsense can't run amok on the server-side without Site Kit's help. By itself, Adsense is just javascript snippets that you put where you want them, which execute on the client side. Yes, they could load a script that parses your page and inserts ads wherever it wants to, but it doesn't seem to do that. The geniuses probably haven't figured it out yet, but I expect it to be a new 'feature' eventually.

So in conclusion, Gargle Site Kit WordPress plugin is a Trojan Horse that allows Gargle to do anything they want to your website. If you are allowing this, you are a fool. Site Kit can probably do Gargle's bidding even if you disable it. The safest thing is to delete it. Any WordPress site with Gargle Site Kit installed is potentially a Gargle zombie.

The truth is, any WordPress plugin or theme could be a Trojan Horse. That is why I avoid them like the plague. But I just caught Gargle red-handed with the ad business. If they will do that, who knows what else they would do. Site Kit sets up the mechanism for Gargle to do anything they want. I wonder if Gargle's computers are smart enough to read this page and get angry at me?