Looking for WP-Since Last Visit plugin users

OK. I jhave all zeroes now. Post a comment or post for me and I’ll check it out.

Gotta go.

Okay, when you get back, this is what I’ve done and am seeing:

1. Posted a comment to your blog. Before I did, though, the banner was saying there was one new post and zero comments. As of right now (after submitting the comment), it still says that, but my comment shows up with “new” next to my name, but in text format — no image. ???

2. Back to my blog: I posted a few test comments and posts. Got 0 on both counts in my banner. The image would show up next to the new comment, but not the title of the post. So I cleared my session cookies and cache, closed my browser and voila — the numbers popped up including the images!

BUT, if you go to that post and then go back to “Home” by clicking on my button at the top, for some reason it refreshes the banner count back to zero. However, going back to the post with a comment still shows “new” next to the author. Go figure.

This last part is troubling because that means the new stuff won’t be indicated as such during the same session, so you have no way of knowing what’s new.

I’m using FF v1.02. Haven’t tried it in IE yet. Maybe there’s some setting in my browser that makes it refresh all the time. I’ll check.

Hang in there Heatsink! ??

I’ve been playing with the PHP file. I’ve determined that the function that compares the cookied date (the user’s last visit) and the date of each post works correctly. This is the function that is responsible for putting the ‘NEW’ image or text beside each posting.

Everything else is borked.

The banner code does not work predictably. I haven’t determined exactly how it figures out how many posts and comments are new, but it’s definitely broken (at least on my server). I don’t think I’ll have time to look into it in too much detail tonight, but perhaps tomorrow I will be able to.

There seems to be some time factor involved in determining what is new and what isn’t which bothers me. I say that because there’s a bunch of code that plays with hours, time differences, and the magic 3600 number. I’m not sure what that’s all about; it seems to me that the banner should be a simple SQL select that counts all posts with a post date newer than the cookie date and prints out that number for the ‘new posts’ bit. Same with the ‘new comments’ bit.

As for the individual NEW indicators on posts and comments, it’s obvious that the comments and posts are done differently because the posts works, but the comments don’t.

In short, the only thing that works on my server is the NEW indicator beside posts.

Since that works, though, I’m pretty confident I can hack Alex’s code to make it work on my server.

As for why it works for podz and not me, I don’t really know. I can only assume some server difference that is significant enough to cause different outputs, but not significant enough to throw an error.

What would really, really, really, really help is some documentation on the wp-last-visit.php file. I’m guessing what the time difference and hours variables do and it takes time-consuming testing to verify whether each of my guesses is right or not.

I’ll post whatever I find.

I’d be interested in seeing what you find out. I’d be especially interested in knowing how to keep the banner’s information staying up a little longer than what’s happening on my blog right now.

While my programming skills are not on par with yours, I’d be happy to help you test; just let me know. ??

Will do. Unless someone chimes in with some other knowledge, I’ll start hacking the code together tomorrow. Once I get the banner working on my end, I’ll post and you can decide if you want to give it a whirl.

Sounds like a plan to me. In case it’s important, I’m on my home computer now and the banner count and new images on my blog won’t reset or go away, respectively. Ironic, that I spent so much time trying to get them to show that now they won’t go away even after I cleared my cache and cookies. LOL!

I’ll keep eye on this thread. Good luck! In case I get tied up, you can always try my contact form at https://www.familywebwatch.com/blog/contact/

I’ve spent some time thinking about how to mod the code of this plugin so that it works for me today. While all this ‘how to’ was going on in my head, I started thinking ‘how come?’.

In short, I’ve decided that the idea of using cookies to track activity since a user’s last visit is flawed. With the advent of so much browser security stuff kicking around, it’s more than likely that a fair share of users have modified (either intentionally or automatically through software) their cookie settings and therefore the behaviour of the plug in is unpredictable.

My own example, for one, seems to cause problems: My actual WP installation resides at https://www.jonwatson.ca/blog, but I have another domain that points to it: https://www.theheatsinkbbs.ca/ I don’t know enough about cookies to know how (or if) this is relevant, but I do know that cookies have a domain component and perhaps the two domains being used interchangeably screws things up.

The only predictable way to present reliable data to the user is to make them log in, and then check for new posts since their last login. All the data is on the server end, nothing on the client end that may be screwy.

I realize that this destroys the whole point of this plugin, but I’d rather have a system that reports meaningful data than one that is subject to so much outside influence.

Having said that, I don’t have any ideas about how to display reliable data to anonymous visitors without using cookies.

So…I’m just not going to use this plugin ??

This may sound stupid, but there is no documentatin with this plugin and I need to know the code to place in my template to use it.

Thanks