Stop refresh counts

Hi @cheryanne,

It’s technically possible, however it’s not something the plugin can do out of the box. You’d need some custom coding work for this:

• First, you’d need to know who watched what. To do this you can either store cookie(s) on the visitor’s browser and/or store their IP address somewhere (eg. database) so you can keep track of their pageviews.
• Then either have WPP ignore/discard non-unique pageviews or -as Google Analytics does for example- store the “repeated” pageviews on a separate table so you can use that data later on if you wanted to (eg. unique pageviews vs total pageviews.)
• Since you’re keeping track of people’s activity on your website (cookies, IP address, etc) you’ll also likely need to explicitly let them know that you’re tracking their activity (eg. for GDPR compliance purposes.)
• Etc.

(Even then, when someone’s truly determined to cheat the system they’ll likely find a way to do it eventually so there’s no bullet-proof way to fully prevent this kind of stuff from happening without taking more drastic measures – eg. identifying the person and banning them from accessing the website.)

Thanks for responding so quickly Hector,

Is it worth adjusting ether the Refresh cache or enabling Data Sampling as a discouragement?

Thanks as always,
Chery.

Data Sampling might at least discourage some users from constantly hitting the F5 button as not every page refresh will result in WPP updating the views count. If you have a mid/high traffic website then this is the easiest but not bullet proof way to go. How many visitors does your site get per day in average?

Having your popular posts only update periodically might fool some of the cheaters for some time. Once they realize that the list does update eventually they’ll just keep hitting that F5 button as they’re doing now. Personally, I wouldn’t rely on this functionality for keeping cheaters from bloating the views count of their posts/pages.

I stumbled upon this plugin that while it hasn’t been actively maintained for over 2 years it might help at least limit the amount of views someone can add to a given post/page: WP Limit Post Views. Personally I’d still go with the suggestion I shared earlier as using the WP Limit Post Views plugin might be a bit of a too aggressive solution but I thought I’d mention it anyways in case you may be interested.

Last but not least, you may want to consider hiring a developer so they can help you implement the solution I suggested (assuming you’re not one yourself and/or that you just don’t have the time to code it yourself.)

Hector,

Thank you so much for taking the time to go through this with me – I really appreciate it.

Chery.