Hello @levy233,
By default the plugin shows the user’s public display name in events, but you can change how users are displayed from the plugin’s Settings page, Activity log viewer tab (/wp-admin/admin.php?page=wsal-settings&tab=audit-log).
Reference screenshot here.
Regarding the event showing an unknown user: that usually appears when the user could not be determined for that specific event, for example a login attempt with invalid credentials, or an action where WordPress did not provide user context. Since you say both edits were made from your admin account, that second record is worth a closer look.
Could you send a screenshot of the event that shows the unknown user, including the event ID and “Event details” expanded? Please censor any sensitive info first (site name, IP address, email). With the event ID we can tell you exactly what was recorded and why the user was not attributed.
Thanks for the reply.
I tried your method, but it still doesn’t work.
View post on imgur.com
As shown in the image, I am the editor for both entries circled in red. However, in the edit popup, the “user” is labeled as “unknown.”
I don’t want it to be like this. I want my name to appear as the editor for any content I edit, rather than “unknown.”
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This reply was modified 2 weeks, 3 days ago by
levy233.
Hello @levy233,
Thank you for the screenshot and for testing the display-name setting. That rules out what I first suspected, so let me be straight with you: this is not the behaviour we’d expect. When the same logged-in admin makes two edits, both should be attributed to your account, not one as you and one as “unknown.”
This looks like a false positive rather than anything actually wrong with your account or your data. What’s most likely happening is that the second edit is being triggered through a slightly different code path than the first, for example a save routine coming from a page builder, an editor customization, or another plugin that hooks into the save process, and in that path WordPress isn’t passing the current user context at the moment our sensor records the event. The plugin logs what it’s given, so if the user context isn’t present at that instant, it falls back to “unknown.” Your edits are still being saved correctly under your account in WordPress itself; this is only about how that one event was attributed in the log.
I tried to reproduce this on a similar setup here and could not get the “unknown” attribution to appear, which tells me it’s tied to something specific about how your site handles that particular type of edit. To track it down and adjust things so the false positive stops happening, could you tell me a bit more about the setup:
- Which theme you’re using
- Which page builder or editor you use for the content being edited (Gutenberg, Elementor, a specific builder, or something custom)
- Any plugins involved in the editing or saving process (page builders, custom post type or field plugins, form or workflow plugins, anything that customizes the editor)
- The event ID shown on both records, the one attributed to you and the one showing “unknown,” with “Event details” expanded
Ideally, if you can tell me the exact steps you took for the edit that logged as “unknown” versus the one that logged correctly, that difference is probably where the answer lies.
Once I can reproduce it, we can look at correcting the sensor so your edits are always attributed to you.
