Feedback and questions

  • Resolved OurDigiTech

    (@ourdigitech)


    2 years, 2 months ago

    Feedback and questions

    Hi. This is going to be slightly lengthy so please bear with me. I was not able to find any other ways of sending feedback so posting it here.

    First of all. Thanks for everyone for making such a nice plugin.

    I have some problems, some requests, some feedback and some questions.

    1. Site Stats

    A) Site Stats is counting even self / admin visits in stats. This is especially the case when one is logged out from admin dashboard and one needs to login. After login it still counts self in the visitors stats. This needs to change. It needs to be able to differentiate between an admin / logged in user of the site and a visitor. Sometimes it detects logged in user as a visitor too.

    B) It needs to stop counting certain bots in Site Stats. I regularly need to check my site on Google’s PageSpeed Index. The problem is, Site Stats counts testing the site through PageSpeed Index (also others) as visitors. This is not right. Run a site on pagespeed index and see it yourself. Almost a dozen of visitors added to site stats. It counts even uptime monitoring services as visitors.

    The problem with above two things is that it gives wrong overall information. Like monthly visitors and such. Yes Google Analytics exists but many prevent it from running on their visits for privacy reasons. Better Jetpack Site Stats, where it differentiates between real users and otherwise, would be much welcomed.

    C) Detailed Site Stats should be available on the site itself. Currently one requires to visit the wordpress.com/stats/ site in order to get detailed site stats as where things like countries, referrers and others are mentioned. I request you guys to make it such way that all the information gets available site on the personal site itself and one does not need to visit the WordPress site for detailed information. I hope all the detailed site stats information gets integrated inside the self hosted Jetpack itself, even if it means self hosted Jetpack needs to contact WordPress site to get all the detailed information. The Site Stats information on the Android WordPress app is far easier to use than the Site Stats on desktop.

    D) It detects my visits as coming from European Union. I am not from European Union, neither do I use any proxy or VPN from such. Nor do I have any other user from European Union. The database from where it collects location data needs updating.

    2. Slideshow Widget

    A) The slideshow widget itself works fine. However, when on front, after the post is made, one cannot right click the image and click open image / open image in new tab and such. Now I do not know it it’s related to my theme. But from what I can see that on a front side, the image is not counted as an image in the browser but a type of page. I request fixing of this. I request that images in slideshow be clickable as images, where right click > open image and open image in new tab like things are visible.

    B) The slideshow widget, on front side, should have a feature that when a person clicks on the slideshow image, it opens the image in fullscreen / large size with dark borders above and below it. Almost like a fullscreen slideshow. This currently is not happening at least on my site. So this is another feature request.

    3. Downtime monitoring

    The downtime monitoring in most cases is not working. My site is unreachable for few mins at least once in a few days. I get an email from other services, but nothing from Jetpack about this. Few days ago my site was down for like 9 hours. Had 500 error. Server side problem. Yet Jetpack did not interpret that error as downtime and did not send me a single email about it. Again, other uptime services did. Jetpack did not. I have enabled all the downtime monitoring settings required in Jetpack and WordPress.com site.

    4. New Firewall Beta

    This is more of a question. I noticed new firewall beta has been made available for free users too. Really good. However, it seems only rules based specific blocking of IPs is allowed and nothing more. Please clarify, does it prevent other things like DDoS and other such things without requiring a paid subscription for it. Reason I ask is that the use of firewall is not limited to just rules based blocking on IP address but a lot more in it. It would be great if the firewall is upgraded to help in other aspects too if not already done in it.

    The page I need help with: [log in to see the link]

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)

  • Hi @ourdigitech

    I appreciate your feedback on the different Jetpack features you are using; that’s encouraging!

    I’ll be handling each of your concerns the way you’ve organized them.

    1. Site Stats

    A) It’s possible you have the option to count logged-in stats turned on; you can find those on the Jetpack Settings → Traffic tab.

    B) We’d appreciate it if you shared specific examples of traffic that should not have been counted, especially from monitoring services. Although difference between Jetpack Stats and other traffic tracking services is expected.

    C) Since Jetpack Stats relies on a connection with your WordPress.com account, all the advanced stats are saved on our end and can be viewed here, there is currently a feature request regarding this, but it hasn’t been implemented yet, you can find it here: https://github.com/Automattic/jetpack/issues/9217

    D) Is this happening specific to your IP address? We’d be happy to look into this further if you can share with us more information here.

    2. Slideshow Widget

    A and B) You can submit any feature request on our Github repository, although there’s no guarantee that they’ll be implemented.

    3. Downtime monitoring

    You can reach out to us privately using the link I’ve provided above, and you can add to that information any specific timestamps from other services of when your website was down, so we can look closely.


    4. New Firewall Beta

    The Jetpack Firewall examines incoming traffic to a WP site and decides to allow or block it based on various rules; however, DDOS protection requires more than that since it usually targets your server instead of specifically your WordPress website. You can find more information below:

    https://jetpack.com/support/jetpack-firewall/

    Best,

    Thread Starter OurDigiTech

    (@ourdigitech)

    Hi @muffinpeace .

    I appreciate you taking time and replying. I personally find Jetpack to be among the best WordPress plugins out there. Especially because it has so many features in it’s free version.

    1. A) I already have disabled counting stats for registered users. That’s not my issue. I issue is that if I open the site without logging in, then login, it still counts my non-logged in visit in same session inside the stats. It should be able to understand that a person logged in hence no need to count his / her non-logged in current ongoing session in stats.

    This is a very small issue. But I thought there’s a room for improvement.

    Thing is, WordPress logs me out every few to several days. No matter how much I try to make sure it remembers me, it logs me out after several days. Requiring me to login. Hence it counting myself in stats when not logged in, is something I noticed.

    B) All site page speed checking sites are counted as visitors from what I know. Google Pagespeed Index and GMatrix to name a couple.

    Similarly, all known uptime monitoring services are counted as visitors. “Better Uptime”, StatusCake too possibly. I have not checked but UptimeRobot can be added to it.

    When I signed up for these services, I was getting like a hundred visitors per day counted in Jetpack stats, all from these services. It should not count them as real visitors.

    C) Thanks for the Github link. Good to see there was some consideration about that. I hope to see such being implemented sooner. Either through an API or through some other way.

    D) Thanks. I will check and reply later on it.

    2. Thanks. I will check and reply. Though I have never made a GitHub account before and have no experience in using it as a member.

    3. Thanks. I will give detailed information on it. But there’s one thing for sure. Jetpack downtime monitoring is not working on my side.

    4. Thanks. The Jetpack Firewall page I checked already. Besides rules based protection, it does not mention anything else. DDoS was just an example I used.

    How about ability to import a list of pre-defined IP addresses. Can that feature be added to it.

    Plugin Support lastsplash (a11n)

    (@lastsplash)

    Hi there –

    Thanks for the additional information. Reading over this, many of these should be requested as features on the Jetpack GitHub repo. As my colleague mentioned, that is the best place to get the requests in front of developers.

    Features that should be requested via GitHub:

    – Your issue with stats and how it counts visitors

    How about ability to import a list of pre-defined IP addresses. Can that feature be added to it.

    – Excluding stats from uptime/site optimization tools

    Lastly, regarding Jetpack Monitor I can see that it is active on your site. Jetpack Monitor pings your site’s homepage (via a HTTP HEAD request) every five minutes.

    We tentatively mark your site as down if the HTTP response code is 400 or greater, which indicates either a permissions error or a fatal code error is prohibiting your site from appearing to visitors, or we see more than three 300-series redirects, suggesting a redirect loop, or if your site fails to respond within 20 seconds.

    Once it is tentatively marked down, we then spin up three separate servers in geographically different locations from a third-party vendor to ensure the problem is not isolated to our network or the location of our primary data center.

    If all three checks fail, we mark the site as down and notify you.

    I noticed that you are using Cloudflare on your site. I’m wondering if Cloudflare was serving a cached page which would in turn indicate to Monitor that your site was still up.

    Thread Starter OurDigiTech

    (@ourdigitech)

    Hi @lastsplash . Thanks for taking time to reply.

    Problem is, as I said, I am not a member on GitHub and hence I am not experienced as how GitHub works as a member. Honestly I might or might not register on it soon. I would prefer if someone more experienced than me in dealing with GitHub raise request issues.

    Also, I checked, apparently, UptimeRobot is not counted in visitors. However, Better Uptime and StatusCake most likely is.

    About the main downtime monitoring issues. As suggested, I am on the email with the Jetpack guys. However, nothing much has come out of it yet.

    I am copy pasting one of my lines from there:

    The 8 and half hour thing happened, the problem was on the server side. I am told that the problem was database related. I did check the site in the middle and it was showing an error connecting to the database. I dobut Cloudflare could play a role. As otherwise I wouldn’t be able to see that error myself when I opened the site myself.

    Thing is, I got 500 error (or was it 521, I don’t remember), so I doubt Cloudflare or Cloudflare online should cause a problem in reporting to the Jetpack there.

    Plugin Support lastsplash (a11n)

    (@lastsplash)

    Hi there –

    Problem is, as I said, I am not a member on GitHub and hence I am not experienced as how GitHub works as a member. Honestly I might or might not register on it soon. I would prefer if someone more experienced than me in dealing with GitHub raise request issues.

    In general, it is best if those who are making the request fill out the form as our developers may have follow-up questions regarding the request.

    Once you make an account, the only step is to fill out a form. It doesn’t require any more experience with GitHub beyond creating an account. You can add the requests here:

    https://github.com/Automattic/jetpack/issues/new?assignees=&labels=%5BType%5D+Enhancement&template=enhancement.yml&title=Enhancement%3A

    I dobut Cloudflare could play a role. As otherwise I wouldn’t be able to see that error myself when I opened the site myself.

    Thanks for the additional information here. Since you have contacted via email, we’ll follow up there.

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
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