What does the counter count exactly?

  • I installed this plugin simply to be able to count the number of times a file is downloaded.
    Everything seems to work fine, but:

    On the very first day of usage, I noticed the number of downloads was much more than the number of pageviews… which seemed a bit strange to me. When checking the log, I noticed a lot of the same IP-adresses which seem to come from Google (all 74.125.113.xxx).
    So I assume that Google bot visits are counted as downloads but of course that is nót what I wanted to see in the result.

    Am I doing something wrong, have I missed something in the installation?

    (BTW – the Log Unique IP setting is not the solution to this question, because I do want to see when a user downloads a file multiple times)

    Help will be greatly appreciated!

    Peter

Viewing 11 replies - 1 through 11 (of 11 total)
  • Plugin Contributor mbrsolution

    (@mbrsolution)

    Hi, does this happen every day? Or was this just a one off incident?

    Thread Starter ambientblog

    (@ambientblog)

    This happened in the first 12 hours.
    I then cleared the log and now, on the second day, I see only reasonable numbers. So maybe it was a one-off (just Google’s enthusiasm about a new page on the net ?? )

    I’ll keep you informed about what happens in the next few days

    Thread Starter ambientblog

    (@ambientblog)

    Oh… I’m afraid it happened again. This time I got 28 ‘downloads’ from one IP 54.154.253.181 which seems to be from Amazon, Ireland.

    Obviously bots are counted as download. Am I the only one experiencing this?

    I love to see large download numbers on my blog but not in this way. If I cannot solve this I’m afraid the plugin is useless for me… ??

    Thread Starter ambientblog

    (@ambientblog)

    I’ll try a robots.txt to exclude the /sdm_downloads directory. See if that works.. Will let you know

    Plugin Contributor mbrsolution

    (@mbrsolution)

    Just one question, is your download protected? If it isn’t you might want to protect your download and see what happens.

    Thread Starter ambientblog

    (@ambientblog)

    No, it’s not a protected download.. and I don’t really want to protect it since it is offered as a free download. I might setup a test page with a protected download if necessary, but for now (last 24 hr) it seems that the robot.txt might have helped.
    I’ll keep you informed!

    Bye
    Peter

    Plugin Contributor mbrsolution

    (@mbrsolution)

    Thank you for keeping me informed……..

    Thread Starter ambientblog

    (@ambientblog)

    Here’s my update after a week:

    The robots.txt seemed to help – a bit… But every few days a new search engine robot (ignoring the robot.txt) seems to download all files almost simultaneously (easily recognisable in the logs – see example below). I remove these log entries manually, a bit of a job but it corrects the download counts.

    Assuming that everyone using this plugin must have the same problem, I guess most people simply enjoy looking at download count that are much too high and not a realistic number.
    Especially since most users will not use a robots.txt.
    I’d love to hear from other users about this.

    log entry example

    Plugin Contributor mbrsolution

    (@mbrsolution)

    Hi, I have sent a message to the plugin developers to investigate further your issue.

    Thank you

    Plugin Author mra13

    (@mra13)

    Each time the download link is accessed, it will count it.

    “Log Unique IP” is the only option that will prevent a count if that particular item has already been downloaded from the given IP.

    The purpose of this plugin is to offer a very simple download counter so it doesn’t really have the specific option you are looking for unfortunately.

    Thread Starter ambientblog

    (@ambientblog)

    Thank you, but Log Unique IP is not a solution for this problem; since I want to know what files users download if they download multiple files. And it would still count the robots.

Viewing 11 replies - 1 through 11 (of 11 total)
  • The topic ‘What does the counter count exactly?’ is closed to new replies.