<p>I have included the URL to my online portfolio in</p>
<ul>
<li>Part 2: "23) Supplements and Portfolios"</li>
<li>Part 2: "14) No admission application can meet your ..."</li>
<li>and in my MidYear report</li>
</ul>
<p>On my website I am running Google Analytics to track my visitors. Unfortunately, there has not been one visitor from Boston.</p>
<p>Does anyone have an idea why MIT has not visited my portfolio yet? Did they just overlooked the URL (which would be a bit weird since it is stated three times in my application)? Or did they simply have not had the time to review it yet ? Or is it likely that they have JavaScript deactivated to bypass Google Analytics?</p>
<p>Since the decisions are released in a couple of weeks I am a bit worried now..... I do not want to annoy the admission team by calling them and asking them why they have not visited my portfolio yet.... </p>
<p>If you sent it to them I’m pretty sure they’ll look. Keep in mind that there are extensions to block Google Analytics, so you might have just not picked up on their visit…</p>
<p>@hennebou in YouTube (analytics) I can track one visitor from Boston (it’s a private video and I only sent MIT the link). But I do not know if YouTube also uses Google Analytics and/or uses some other software. Maybe YouTube uses PHP to determine the IP and track the user and therefore would not require JavaScript (in case MIT has a JS blocker) - but that’s only speculations.</p>
<p>@snowball - I wouldn’t be bothering them with calls now. Also, I would expect much of the decision making to be done already - so don’t know if it would positively affect your application. </p>
<p>Most probably they deactivated javascript/blocked Google analytics. But if its eating you up and not letting you sleep - then write them a prompt mail with the link.</p>
<p>MIT makes every effort to look at links that are included in the application, but there’s no guarantee that they are able to look at everyone’s links. This doesn’t indicate anything about your application, positive or negative.</p>
<p>I agree with others that it’s likely the readers intentionally block popular tracking mechanisms – if I were a reader, I certainly wouldn’t want applicants overanalyzing whether I had visited a link or not, or when, or for how long.</p>
<p>We had the same experience - not just with MIT but other colleges we applied to. The online research papers have been ignored by everyone but ‘bots’ - no colleges have looked at them. I’m thinking we should have sent in hard copies of the research to be certain the work was reviewed.</p>
<p>Hmm. I am an EA accepted student, but I was in a simliar situation. When I called MIT admissions (on a different matter), out of curiosity, I asked about websites. They said that they did make every effort to look at applicants’ websites.</p>
<p>Looking through my logs (generated using a foolproof method, not something that depends on the client like Javascript), I found that they did access most of the pages on my site and viewed most of the videos. They actually looked at stuff at two distinct points in time (the second time about 10 days before decisions were released).</p>
<p>If I were you, I wouldn’t worry. They might just have JS disabled, or they might be blocking Google Analytics in particular.</p>
<p>Congratulations for being accepted, @localhost! May I ask you how you knew that “they did access” your site? I am asking cause I searched through my logs, too and indeed there are entries which do not match to the Google Analytics entries. But how do I know that it was MIT? A reverse IP lookup only told me the provider and the location of the provider hosting the IP - not the university itself. Did you just provide MIT only your link so you knew for sure or how did you do it?</p>
<p>But the readers don’t read only from campus – it’s typical that they read from home, or from coffee shops or libraries. So any hit from the Boston area could be an MIT admissions reader.</p>
<p>Though I did get a lot of hits from Cambridge , Boston , Massachusetts etc.
My website itself is my personal brand so I am not sure if its MIT or some random geek looking me up on google.</p>
<p>But also when i notice the time spent on the website seems to be pretty low to take in all the content.</p>
<p>Oh god, not this guy again. You should all read the 2 posts localhost linked above, they’re kinda distracting (if you manage to stay calm…).</p>
<p>Btw, I just got how they access our portfolios/Youtube videos…
I just did it 2mins ago to access evanl’s website…
They’re using VPNs/Proxies ! No way to know where the connection comes from…</p>
<p>Lol, you guys are so much better at technology than I am! I just set up a google site and have been using google analytics, which apparently can be blocked. So I guess that’s more motivation to keep updating my site!</p>
<p>EDIT: Though I did get a hit from MIT a few months back that I’m pretty sure was real. Though it was only for lik a minute 45 seconds :)</p>
<p>The only possible way to disable GA (google analytics) is to disable javascript. However it is unlikely that adcoms surf the web with JS disabled because a large part (or infact, most ?) of the web depends on JS which is part of the HTML5 specification (ECMA). none the less if you’re deploying your website on apache or PHP, you can leverage the HTTP headers for obtaining the real location of the visitor by noting their IP address and then parsing it through some ip to gelocation library.</p>
<p>Yes certainly(I was talking in context of an average joe), There are far more ways if you’re experienced enough like unix hosts, iptable rules, firewall rules, greasemonkey scripts etc… but these things are uncommon and unknown to most outside of EECS. Infact those aware of these means are also aware of how important these analytic statistics are.</p>
?</p>