PVC Just Suddenly Stopped Counting visits.

  • Resolved dirkmittler

    (@dirkmittler)


    6 years, 2 months ago

    Hello.

    I use a WordPress version which is based on WordPress.org, but in which the core files are maintained by Debian Team, which is why I’ve stated such a weird WordPress version number. Yet, I’m set up to be able, to install 3rd-party plug-ins. I’ve been using Post Views Counter (PVC) for years.

    But an odd development has just begun. For February 9, the PVC dashboard widget is showing, that I had 252 direct views to postings. But since then, for the 10th and the 11th of February, PVC indicates that I’ve had zero visits.

    Consistently with that, the number of direct views to postings I made, since February 9, is also being shown as zero. I have set PVC to ignore viewings from bots.

    I know that this information is false, because I can just

    cat /var/log/apache2/access.log

    And my server log states, that my blog has been viewed, by users that have a valid browser-version as their UA, as recently as this morning, on February 11. This is an example of the entries in the server log:

    173-234-58-102.ipvnow.com - - [11/Feb/2018:10:08:11 -0500] "GET /blog/archives/671 HTTP/1.1" 200 22220 "http://dirkmittler.homeip.net/blog/wp-comments-post.php" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64; rv:56.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/56.0"

    So, somebody viewed posting 671, according to the way I have my permalinks set to use posting-numbers.

    I was wondering whether the plugin-author could shed some light on this.

    Dirk

    • This topic was modified 6 years, 2 months ago by dirkmittler.

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  • Thread Starter dirkmittler

    (@dirkmittler)

    6 years, 2 months ago

    Follow-Up:

    I just did an experiment, in which I left my LAN – which is hosting my blog – and accessed the blog from outside, from the WAN, using my smart-phone browser. I made it a point, to access one posting specifically, which is usually what I have PVC set up to isolate and count. This also means that my IP-address at the time was a public one, which was not black-listed by me, as opposed to IP-addresses on my LAN, which are blacklisted.

    The result was, that my smart-phone was able to view that posting by itself, without error, but that even an hour later, Post Views Counter is still showing me zero views.

    This seems to confirm that there is a problem in how PVC is operating right now, and not, with nobody visiting my postings. At least one person – me – has since visited a posting of mine.

    I should add, the observation that in the line of the server-log which I gave as an example above, the fact that the referrer-URL was a Comment-URL, has little meaning on my blog, because I tend to use such comments as cross-links between my postings. Every time I link to one of my own postings, from another posting, I have ping-back enabled, so that a Comment is also generated. Hence, a Human can easily be clicking on a Comment-Link first, and then retrieving the Posting linked-to from there.

    And this was the entry in my server-log, of me doing so:

    184.151.111.223 - - [11/Feb/2018:13:43:00 -0500] "GET /blog/archives/4739 HTTP/1.1" 200 11882 "http://dirkmittler.homeip.net/blog/" "Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 7.0; SM-G920W8 Build/NRD90M) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/64.0.3282.137 Mobile Safari/537.36"

    Dirk

    • This reply was modified 6 years, 2 months ago by dirkmittler.
    • This reply was modified 6 years, 2 months ago by dirkmittler.
    • This reply was modified 6 years, 2 months ago by dirkmittler.
    Thread Starter dirkmittler

    (@dirkmittler)

    6 years, 2 months ago

    Conclusion:

    Because I’m also using an aggressive caching plug-in, I next decided to switch the method by which ‘PVC’ works, from PHP to JavaScript. And within a few minutes, PVC started to count 4 Post Views! 🙂

    The mystery which is left unanswered by this would be, why then, ‘Post Views Counter’ was reporting views accurately, until the 9th of February, when its setting was to use PHP, with the caching plug-in working.

    Now, I’ll just have to settle for a statistically-weaker count next to each posting, because many people have their browsers set to block scripts. 🙂

    Dirk

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