Ben Cole

Both automatic updates for social networks and google analytics use the same schedule, and the same system (cron, or footer). Setting the date range to “no posts” means that no automatic updates will happen, including from google analytics.

So if your goal is to have no updates from social networks, but automatic updates from Google Analytics, then you’ll need to make sure the update range is set to either All Posts, or a set date range. You can disable the social networks from updating by turning them all off under the API Connection Settings.

There is a way!

On the configuration page, you can set ‘Update Range’ to ‘No Posts’ and the plugin will not perform any background updates. You can still manually click “Update Now” on the report page to update a single post.

If you want automatic updates for Google Analytics and not social networks, you can go to the API Connection Settings area and disable all of the social networks listed.

This should be resolved in version 1.6.5 (released just now!)

Hello,

Thanks for the bug report – I was able find the error and fix it.

I’ll release it with version 1.6.5 later this week!

Hello, I think the problem was occurring when the plugin tried to schedule updates for post types which had zero published posts.

I made a patch which should fix this, can you update the plugin to version 1.6.4 and let me know if this resolves the issue?

Hello, I made a change which I think might resolve this issue. Can you update the plugin to version 1.6.4 and let me know if the settings page now shows up on the menu?

That’s odd. I haven’t heard of the configuration page not even showing up on the menu. Are there any PHP errors related to the plugin in your servers PHP error log?

Where have you seen others who have had this issue as well?

I believe it is the same number, and the plugin will track both of them. It’s comparable to sharing a link on Facebook, and then having some people click the Like button.

Sounds like the plugin is only collecting stats for URLs with trailing slashes, but URLs for your site have been shared without trailing slashes. The plugin doesn’t currently have settings to check URLs with and without trailing slashes, but I could consider adding that as a possibility in the future.

In the mean time, you can manually add additional URLs to track for each post by adding a post custom field with the key “socialcount_url_data” and the value equal to the alternate URL that should be associated with the post.

Hello!

Regarding page views, it’s possible that some URL variant is being tracked by Google Analytics (for example with or without trailing slash, query variables, different subdomain with or without www, etc) and that it is not matching up correctly with the permalink stored by wordpress for each post.

Regarding accessing old data, all of the stats are stored as post meta fields. You can view/edit the custom fields for a post on the Edit Post screen in WordPress, and find the fields that this plugin created to store the stats.

Hello!

The Twitter API is down because Twitter has officially removed it. You can read more on these threads:

https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/will-twitters-changes-of-chare-counts-affect-smt
https://www.ads-software.com/support/topic/alternative-counter-for-disabled-twitter-api

The Wikipedia URL is a generic test URL that this plugin uses when it needs to try to reconnect to an API when there are errors.

Version 1.6.3 of the plugin is now released which removes the Twitter API =(

The stats are no longer updating because Twitter officially shut off their API that provides share counts.

I would love to substitute the twitter counter with an alternate source. There doesn’t seem to be a great alternative, though OpenSharecount.com looks promising. I will keep an eye on that service for a week or two and see if it seems to be stable and accurate and if so I may be able to add it as an alternate data source.

I doubt that service accounts for URL shorterners though, so the counts may be significantly different than the numbers Twitter used to provide.

Please post here if anyone has other possible methods to retrieve twitter share counts.

Hello, it sounds like your cron is not running, just like you described. You’ll probably need to do some tweaking to get your cron tasks to run properly. Here’s one article describing some troubleshooting steps:

https://tommcfarlin.com/wordpress-cron-jobs/

In the future I might be able to add an option to this plugin to not rely on the WP cron.

That does not sound normal. I checked on my sites and I don’t see this happening. Maybe there could be another plugin on your site causing a conflict by filtering post queries or pagination parameters?

Perfect, now we know what the error is! Looks like the Google API that this plugin uses has a rate limit set, and your site must be exceeding the rate limit. The long term solution will be that I need to update the plugin to allow users with high update rates to register Google API keys to allow for the higher query rate.

In the mean time, you can adjust the plugin settings and set a longer data TTL to reduce the frequency that the plugin tries to connect to the APIs.

Also, this fix from 1.6.2 should prevent the count from resetting to zero when the rate limit error occurs, which is what I think was happening previously. Now when there is a connection error, it should retain the old count instead of resetting it to zero.