Ben Cole

Hello,

I’ve released version 1.3.1 which should resolve this problem.

Hello, has the cron finished and do you see more posts now? It takes a while for the plugin to collect data on all of the posts.

Does your server support SSL connections? The Facebook API requires an SSL connection to retrieve data.

I will be releasing a patch soon (1.3.1, probably this Friday) which will display notices / error messages when the plugin has trouble connecting to the social networks. Right now all errors happen silently in the background (errors don’t even go to the error log). Once I release the patch the plugin should display more helpful error messages to see why Facebook is not updating.

Hi MassimoD,

Thanks, I will add this to my list of bugs to fix. I need to update the Dashboard widget to correctly show the names of social networks other than Facebook/Twitter.

Version 1.3 is now released, try it out and let me know if you have any issues!

Hello, I think I have been able to identify the problem. Version 1.3 of the plugin should be able to activate without causing this error. I moved some setup tasks outside of the activation code so that those tasks can be done separately. Please try it out and let me know if there is still an error on plugin activation.

https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/social-metrics-tracker/

Yes, in the mean time you can edit the file social-metrics-tracker.php:

Around line 238, find this code:

if ($this->is_development_server()) {
	// Do not schedule update
} else {
	// Sync all data
	MetricsUpdater::scheduleFullDataSync();
}

and replace with:

if ($this->is_development_server()) {
	// Do not schedule update
} else {
	// Sync all data
	// MetricsUpdater::scheduleFullDataSync();
}

So that you simply comment out the line which schedules the full sync when the plugin is activated. Data will still be collected after the plugin is activated, it will just take a little while for all of the posts to be updated.

Note that in this case data will only be collected if a post is actually viewed by a site visitor, so if you have old posts which don’t receive any visitors, then no data will be retrieved for those posts until they are viewed at least once.

Hello!

I think you are correct; currently the plugin attempts to query all of the posts during plugin activation. I will change this for the next version (1.3) which I plan to release within 2 weeks so that the plugin does not attempt to query/activate.

If you would like to help me test out version 1.3, send me an email ([email protected]) and I’ll send you a .zip file with the new plugin code which should hopefully be able to activate on your site.

I’ll post another reply here when the update is released. Thanks for your feedback with the plugin!

Sure, if you can email me additional info that would be great. My email is [email protected]

Just to confirm, you installed the plugin on Friday (about 3 days ago) and it was your first time using the plugin and all of the social numbers still say zero?

If you try to manually update a post by clicking “Update Stats” under an individual post on the Social Metrics Tracker reporting view, does it still not update the numbers?

I am currently working on a major update (version 1.3) which will change the way social scores are updated by fetching the numbers directly from the social networks. This version should be ready within a few weeks and I think it should resolve this issue when I am able to release it.

Haha, thanks! I try to do my best =)

Okay, version 1.2.5 is released with the fix!

Thanks for reporting the bug and providing super helpful debug info. Please let me know if you notice any other issues with the plugin in the future.

I logged in to your Dashboard and was able to modify the plugin files from there, so FTP access is no longer required. And I think I figured it out! Looks like there was an error in my PHP code which only affects certain versions of PHP. What version of PHP is running on your server so that I can make sure to test it?

I’ll have an updated version of the plugin ready later this afternoon.

I don’t see any plugins on that list which look like they would cause conflicts.

One more thing to try – can you completely delete the social metrics tracker plugin and files, then re-download and install the plugin? I’m wondering if there’s any chance that the process of upgrading the plugin did not correctly update all of the files. I don’t think that’s the problem though.

Would you be willing to grant me access to your site to do some debugging on the plugin? My email address is [email protected] if you would be willing to share FTP and WP Dashboard access. I would modify only the social metrics tracker plugin code on your server to see if I can identify the problem.

Alternately, I could create a test PHP file that you could upload to the server which would run some tests and print out some debug messages.

Thanks, that debug info is helpful. That data confirms that the updater is running, but for some reason it isn’t fetching and saving the social numbers. I checked the URL you provided and there are some shares being reported for the URL.

Let’s try something.. can you go to the Configuration page for the plugin and re-save the settings that are there and make sure that “Post Types” has the correct items selected? (It should at least have “post” checked).

After that, try to manually trigger an update for yesterdays post and see if it picks up any social shares (When you hover over a post on the Social Metrics page there is a link underneath which says “Update Stats” which will trigger an update immediately.)

Also, you mentioned that this affects new posts but have the numbers for older posts also been changed to zero as well? Or just the new posts?

I installed iThemes Security with the default options and it didn’t seem to cause a problem for me.

Do you use SSL for either the public pages of your site, or the admin Dashboard? If the URL to posts begins with https:// or https://, each has a separate share count with the social networks. I have been meaning to update the plugin so that it checks for both and adds the numbers together, but currently they are counted separately. If you switched from one to the other, that would explain numbers switching to zero.

Can you give me an example URL to one of your posts (which has at least a few shares) so that I can check to see what kinds of numbers are returned by the social network APIs?