Some posts have visits counted, some do not

Hi Steven,

The plugin won’t count visits from logged in users only. Otherwise, the views count should increase everytime someone reads any of your posts.

Thank you for getting back to me.

Can you explain what you mean by “logged in users”?

Here’s what’s happening — when I look at my site with Google Analytics Real-Time I see one post that’s visited by new people a couple times an hour — dozens of times a day. On some days the numbers in WPP change — but others days they don’t change at all.

Can you help me understand what’s going on?

Logged in users are those people who logged in into your wp-admin area (such as yourself). WPP won’t count visits generated by these users, so there might be a difference with what Google Analytics displays.

Thank you for the explanation.

But the only logged-in user is me — so this would not explain the huge difference between the hits recorded in Google Analytics — and the hits that show up on WPP.

Could there possibly be a plug-in conflict?

Thank you very much for your time on this — I am hoping an answer can be discovered.

WPP always updates the views count of every post and page when a visitor checks it (unless, as I said before, this visitor is logged in into WordPress), so I’m not sure what might be causing this difference with Google Analytics.

Might investigate about that, however it’s not a priority now.

Is it possible that WPP doesn’t count visits from Google organic searches? I’ve got hundreds of visits from Google searches which are not showing up in WPP.

Is it possible to count and indentify the posts visited by a loged in user and register it?

The plugin does not count visits generated by logged-in users, but that might change soon. About logging and identifying visits, what use can be made of it?

I feel there is something odd going on also – sometimes WPP just stops counting visitors. It’s like a whole day no changes, though I’m sure there were visitors. Then I click a bit around on its admin page – and then visit my page myself in another browser… and then it starts counting again (mine and other visits).

Can’t quite figure it out whats going on. Maybe its because I use W3 Super Cache – and I check the WPP stats often. I’ll keep trying to reproduce the problem.

It’s because of W3 Super Cache. The current version of WordPress Popular Posts doesn’t support it, so what you see is the cached version of the popular list – not the actual one.

I’ve been working on a solution to support caching plugins and so far the tests seem to prove it’s working fine. I’ve uploaded a development version of the plugin that includes this fix.

Cool, thanks – I’m trying it right now, and seems to work so far.
Though if that was the case, it still was kinda strange always once I emptied the W3 cache, it didn’t just show all the posts that must have accumulated in the meantime. It din’t seem count them I suspect.
I’ll keep an eye on it.

BTW: did you change the post_start functionality? It doesn’t seem to add that part anymore.

Yes, that’s been changed. The current way to customize the HTML markup of the listing is not as flexible as it could be, so I’ve been doing some experiments with that. A new parameter has been created to replace both post_start and post_end: post_html. Here’s an example:

[wpp range=monthly order_by=views stats_comments=1 stats_author=1 stats_category=1 limit=10 post_type=post post_html="<li><a href='{url}' title='{text_title}'>some text</a> by {author} viewed {views} time(s) with {comments} awesome comment(s) under {category}</li>"]

Edit: actually, just detected a minor bug in there. Will fix it and upload a new version in a couple of hours.

I noticed that posts get counted 4 times, although I’m quite sure only one person would have clicked on them.
Reverted for now.

The post html is a cool idea btw.

Thank you, I’ve been wanting to implement that for a while. I’m a web developer myself so I believe this approach is much, much better than the previous one.

About the views duplicating, did you change anything in wp-admin > Settings > WordPress Popular Posts > Tools? Can you please tell me your current settings so I can try to reproduce that bug?