WP Popular Posts suddenly stopped counting

  • Resolved Michael

    (@mischnu)


    6 years, 5 months ago

    Hi there,

    only today I realized that my WPPP suddenly stopped counting one month ago as you can see in that screenshot: https://ibb.co/c2eiUo

    Indeed on May, 22nd, I did update WP Popular Posts among some other plugins and my theme as well. And I switched the site to HTTPS. Looking at the plugin settings, everything looks fine. So … right now I don’t know where to start looking for the wrongdoer. Any suggestions? When I uninstall and re-install the plugin, will the data and my set-up widgets be wiped?

Viewing 5 replies - 1 through 5 (of 5 total)
  • Plugin Author Hector Cabrera

    (@hcabrera)

    Hi @mischnu,

    Without more details from you (site’s URL, active plugins, et cetera) it’s a bit difficult to tell what’s going on.

    When I uninstall and re-install the plugin, will the data and my set-up widgets be wiped?

    Not sure about the widgets, but the data will be deleted if you uninstall the plugin.

    Thread Starter Michael

    (@mischnu)

    Thanks @hcabrera,

    so I’m glad not having tried the “uninstall/re-insall” trick. ??

    The site is https://www.lanline.de and here you are the installed plugins:

    • ACF Content Analysis for Yoast SEO
    • Activity Log
    • Auto-hyperlink URLs
    • Benutzerrolleneditor Pro
    • Co-Authors Plus
    • Core Control
    • Custom Post Type UI
    • Eigene Felder
    • Force Regenerate Thumbnails
    • Import User from text file
    • Ninja Forms
    • Quick Page/Post Redirect Plugin
    • Related Posts for WordPress Premium
    • Relevanssi
    • Secondary Title
    • Shortcodes Ultimate
    • Show Latest Post Thumbnail Widget
    • Text Truncator
    • User Switching
    • Widget CSS Classes
    • WordPress Popular Posts
    • WP Bitly
    • WP Cerber Security & Antispam
    • WP Real Media Library
    • Yoast SEO
    Plugin Author Hector Cabrera

    (@hcabrera)

    Thanks @mischnu.

    Whenever WPP tries to update the views count of any of your posts & pages, your server responds with “403 Access Forbidden”.

    The plugin uses the REST API to update the views count in the database so if I had to guess I’d say that WP Cerber Security & Antispam is the one to “blame” here. I say “blame” (note the double quotes) because I understand WP Cerber Security & Antispam -as well as other security plugins out there- implemented an option to block requests to the REST API for security reasons. Said API was discovered to have some security holes around a year ago so it made sense to add an extra security layer to prevent its misuse. Nowadays though if you’re running a recent version of WordPress this shouldn’t be necessary anymore.

    So, in short, chances are you have WP Cerber Security & Antispam set up to block REST API requests. Disable this feature to allow them and WPP will work as expected.

    Thread Starter Michael

    (@mischnu)

    Great @hcabrera, you hit it!

    I’ve added ‘wordpress-popular-posts’ to the allowed REST API namespaces in WP Cerber, and I immediately can see some counts. Pretty cool.

    Many thanks to you!

    Plugin Author Hector Cabrera

    (@hcabrera)

    I had no idea WP Cerber had such a feature. That’s quite handy! Thanks for reporting back, I’m sure other users stumbling upon this topic will appreciate it.

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