Activity log: Bots 404

Hi,

I’m not sure I understand what exactly you’re saying. If Shield is saying they’re 200 in the log, then they’re not triggering false 404s in the logs.

You said “but showing response 200 in the traffic log” – which traffic log is that? If it’s Shield, then it’s not considered a false 404. Shield relies on WordPress’ own determination of what is a 404. It doesn’t try to make this determination on its own.

If you could clarify exactly what you’re seeing, and with what tools, that’d help us narrow down if there’s a bug somewhere.

If you’re using 2 separate WP activity log plugins, this isn’t something we can fix. 2 different plugins may log things slightly differently and we can’t mitigate for that.

In Shield’s own traffic log, where it says 404, have you tried accessing the URL that triggered this? Is it really a 404? Does it matter if you’re logged-in, or not?

Thanks,

I am only using one activity log/security plugin on my site.

Sorry If I am mistaken, but there are two logs in this plugin: the activity logs and the traffic logs. Well, when a genuine user accesses a buddypress page on my site, the activity log logs it as bots: 404 but the traffic log logs response: 200. The traffic log is correct because the page is available, however the activity log is logging false 404 when the page is actually there and the user is not a bot. These (dynamic) pages exist and can be accessed, no 404 error page is triggered, yet the activity logs it as 404.

I’ve narrowed it down, this seems to be happening when the youzify plugin is active on the site, this is a buddypress extension memebership plugin so it is needed on my site.

I just don’t understand why these pages are showing the correct 200 response in the traffic logs but showing 404 in the activity log.

Hope I’ve explained it well.

Thanks

Hi

Okay, this helps me know that you’re not using multiple logging systems. When you’re looking at the Activity Log, the meta data (such as HTTP response code) is based on the underlying traffic log data – they use the same data. We need to be sure we’re looking at the correct data.

The best thing here is to show an example of what you’re seeing.

So on your Activity Log, if you can locate an entry that you feel is “incorrect”, can you take a screenshot of it – feel free to blur the IP, it doesn’t matter here. I’d like to seen the log message and also if you click on the little “meta” icon on the right-hand side of the row, this will display your traffic log meta data. Can you take a screenshot of this and display it somewhere for me to see exactly what you’re seeing?

So your screenshot would show:

• The activity log entry message
• The corresponding traffic log meta box

e.g.

Hello!

I’ve attached a screenshot of the log accessing my profile page.

Screenshot 2024-06-24 at 14.01.09.png

• This reply was modified 5 months ago by mystudenthouse.
• This reply was modified 5 months ago by mystudenthouse.

Gotcha, that’s perfect, thank you for sharing that.

And just to clarify, these URLs are in-fact completely valid?

We’re going to have to investigate why this would be happening. Is there any particularly configuration of the youzify plugin we should pay attention to, in order to be able to reproduce this?

Hi,

Yes, the URL is valid, you can check here.

And the only thing that I can think of is that I have a few temporary redirects within the youzify plugin, but they work as expected.

I kept all the profile and directory slugs as default within youzify so that they correspond to the default buddypress slugs. It seems, your plugin (or at least the activity log) doesn’t acknowledge these URLs as valid while the youzify plugin is activated.

Hope this helps!

• This reply was modified 5 months ago by mystudenthouse.

Hi,

Any update on this?

Thanks

Nope, this will take time to investigate and debug, and will require a patch release to fix it in all likelihood, if we can find the cause. We’ll do this as quickly as we can allocate resources.

To be entirely transparent, we fix bugs as a priority wherever possible, but we generally elevate priority for support requests made by our ShieldPRO customers – that’s not to say bugs get immediate priority, however.

I’m raising that point to set expectations, and as we can’t get into details about our paid solutions in this forum, if supporting our work is something you’re interested in, you can learn more about that here.

Thanks.

I completely understand giving priority to premium users. I would’ve liked to purchase ShieldPRO but it wouldn’t work well for my website considering major pages would be wrongly blocked.

Anyway, thank you for taking the time to respond.