1 post viewed, stats shows 2 posts viewed

Hello Peter,
Thanks to share your problem.
The above information you are showing that your plugins have created glitch into the database and this will need to make updated before running your blog.
You must clear your database and remove unnecessary updation from the WP-OPTION data table via p database access.
I face the same problem with my blog [link redacted] and after remove the plugins quires executed by the plugins. The blog working fine.

• This reply was modified 7 years, 2 months ago by Andrew Nevins.

@mybirchi, Thanks for helping out, I just have to raise a very minor point and that is to avoid linking to your site when providing support. That’s all, thanks again.

Okay
Thanks Andrew

Hi mybirchi,

Thanks for your reply as I have been trying to fix this problem for more than a year and failed at it.

I did not understand what you had mentioned.

1. I used phpmyadmin to look at the database but could not find a WP Options data table. Should there be one there or am I looking at the wrong place?

2. I have written 3 of my own plugins but for safety safe and to make it impossible for my plugins to corrupt the database they do not access the database at all. There are only 4 plugins that I used to use. They are Google Sitemap by BestWebSoft which I only activate after I have written a post, SEOPressor which I have deactivated and not used for a few years, SI Captcha Anti-Spam which I have now deactivated and lastly Limit Login Attempts which normally is active but turned off over the last few days to find a solution to this problem.

In this case how would I clear the database as, from experience, some years back the export/import feature does not work properly, so the fear of loss of parts of my web site still keeps the flight or fight response active in me. I hate trying to clean up the database as in my case it has never worked. My sites do get hacked a lot so I have spent many years developing code to block hackers. I did find one post that appeared to be corrupted or missing but I edited the database to clean it up. It has lasted a year now but It has gone missing again. The rest of the posts are in good condition so I dread trying to clean up the database.

This means I do not know how to “You must clear your database and remove unnecessary updation from the WP-OPTION data table via p database access”.

Even with the plugins deactivated I still get the problem. Should I try deleting them one by one?

Thanks for your help and am eagerly waiting for your response.

Hi mybirchi,

Let me correct the previous message. There is a wp options table but I do not know what to check for.

Thanks and best regards,
Peter

Hi mybirchi,

I went through the WP Options table and when I was listing all the records (220 records) phpmyadmin gave me a warning:-

Warning: A form on this page has more than 5000 fields. On submission some fields might be ignored due to PHP’s max_input_vars configuration

Does this mean one record was corrupted?

Peter

Just to let those reading this know that I found that some themes also create garbage posts. I found this when I was inspecting the WP POSTS database table and noticed garbage posts records which were inserted when I was testing different themes to replace Atahualpa theme.

Beware of the themes you check out.

Hi mybirchi (@mybirchi)

Thanks for your help. I found out that you are correct about this (its a database problem) but I have not solved the problem yet. It is still there. If I managed to solve it I will report it here.

I used many database plugins to clear/restore/correct/restore my database and my database size dropped from 8MB to 2MB. Unfortunately, the problem did not go away.

I then tried to install WP version 4.0.0 which I had downloaded many years ago to check if the problem was related to the later versions of WP. Unfortunately, WP would not allow me to run version 4.0 and insisted that I upgrade to version 4.9.2. and WP upgraded the database.

Then I used phpmyadmin to export the WP POST table to an XML file and deleted all of WP (files & database) so that I was starting with a clean slate. I reinstalled WP (version 4.9.2), installed the Twenty Ten Theme and deleted the two records in table WP POST and imported the XML file into this table. Unfortunately that did not work either.

Fortunately, I had kept a copy of an older database when I moved servers. The older database is about 30MB in size. After editing wp-config.php file to use the older database the problem disappeared! Amazing! This ‘confirms’ that it is a database issue or at least related to the WP program accessing the database.

Unfortunately, I do not want to use the older database so I am back to square one.

Will update you later.

Thanks
Peter

• This reply was modified 7 years, 1 month ago by peter achutha.
• This reply was modified 7 years, 1 month ago by peter achutha.

Those plugins I have used are not the cause.

I found out that 1 post viewed but stats shows 2 posts viewed only occurs in FireFox. It does not occur if I use Chrome browser.

I will get back if I have anymore info.

Today I confirmed that this problem occurs even on other servers. I originally saw the problem on Reseller Panel servers using Hepsia Control Panel but upon testing with InMotion servers using cPanel, the problems still exists. So it does not appear to be server related issue.

I found out that when I use FireFox and viewed the last post, only one post is recorded as viewed. Unfortunately, if I view any earlier post, not the last published post in WordPress, the logs will always show that I viewed two posts.

When I used Opera, Internet Explorer or Chrome, I never had 1 WordPress webpage viewed but 2 recorded in the access logs. So this issue is not replicated using other browsers. It appears to be only a FireFox issue.

If FireFox or WordPress trouble shooting staff need my WordPress database to reproduce my WordPress site on their servers to trouble shoot the problem I am willing to provide it to them.

• This reply was modified 6 years, 10 months ago by peter achutha.

Today I decided to confirm that the issue was not related to the database or the plugins. So I deleted my temporary WordPress site and installed the latest version – WordPress version 4.9.6.

I did not install any plugins and created three posts, ‘step-one’, ‘step-two’ and ‘step-three’. The ‘hello-world’ post was not deleted.

Then I used chrome browser and looked at step-one webpage. After that I used FirFox to look at step-two web page.

See the access logs records below (I did not show all the records related to loading of these pages):-

——— access log revords ————

183.78.44.68 – – [20/May/2018:20:54:58 -0700] “GET /mytest/step-one/ HTTP/2.0” 200 57810 “https://drpetersnews.com/mytest/” “Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/66.0.3359.181 Safari/537.36”

183.78.44.68 – – [20/May/2018:20:10:18 -0700] “GET /mytest/step-two/ HTTP/2.0” 200 57803 “https://drpetersnews.com/mytest/” “Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; Win64; x64; rv:60.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/60.0”

183.78.44.68 – – [20/May/2018:20:10:24 -0700] “GET /mytest/step-three/ HTTP/2.0” 200 57294 “https://drpetersnews.com/mytest/step-two/” “Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; Win64; x64; rv:60.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/60.0”

———- end of records ————-

Chrome show one wep page viewed that is step-one web page, where as FireFox shows two pages viewed – step-two and step-three. It claims that I viewed step-three webpage too.

So it appears that the issue is not related to WordPress plugins or Themes an only to FireFox. Does this mean that if your visitors use FireFox, the search engines will think that your site has twice the number of visitors and improve your ranking?

Hi mybirchi @mybirchi,

Finally, I have managed to fix the problem. After months of changing and testing PHP code I noticed that if there is ‘bad’ code in the PHP script this problem can get worse. I noticed that when there is a variable that is not set (isset() is false) and you test the variable with an ‘if’ condition the visitor stats shows more visits.

This error notice showed up when my script was getting worse was:-

Notice: Undefined index: 183.78.44.237 in /home/bachutha/public_html/index.php(46) : eval()’d code on line 1070

the code was:
if( $ip == $ipaa[$ip][0] ){ ...

In order to receive this warning I had to add the following code in WordPress index.php at the top.

ini_set('display_errors', 1);
ini_set('display_startup_errors', 1);
error_reporting(E_ALL);

My guess is that was probably why the plugin you mention was causing the problem.

I had asked around in one of the FireFox forums but there was no response. A few days ago I submitted this problem to bugzilla, https://bugzilla.mozilla.org, for reporting bugs in Mozilla products. One of the tech support guys responded, https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1494272, and told me to check https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-stop-firefox-making-automatic-connections.

That was when I found out the FireFox does a prefetch for the next webpage. This prefetch results in two webpages visited instead of one (and messes with my visitor stats).

When I set network.prefetch-next option in Firefox to ‘false’ the second webpage visit disappeared from the stats. Problem solved. I am still monitoring the situation. My guess is that the plugin problem you mentioned may be ‘bad’ PHP code and may be related to the network.prefetch-next option set to true too.

Unfortunately, as I am rushing to get my hacker protection firewall for WordPress up and running, I have not done any tests to confirm that ‘bad’ PHP code will not cause more webpage views when network.prefetch-next option is set to ‘false’.

I hope this helps others too.

• This reply was modified 6 years, 5 months ago by peter achutha.
• This reply was modified 6 years, 5 months ago by peter achutha.
• This reply was modified 6 years, 5 months ago by peter achutha.

Bugzilla tech support has just informed me is that “Firefox does only prefetching if there are headers present in the html document.”