Data Suddenly Gone (“All-time” still shows values)

Hi there,

The plugin admin page shows no data for any time span, other than “All-time” which still correctly displays the top 5 posts of all time.

(…) we are using the latest version of both plugin & WP.

This is a bit contradictory. The latest version of WPP doesn’t have an “All-Time” tab anymore (see version 4.0 release notes). Are you sure you’re running the latest version of WPP (4.0.8 at the time of writing this)?

Not the OP, but mine is doing the exact same thing. Everything was fine, then all of a sudden it just says “Sorry, No data so far” on the public side.

I have 4.0.8 installed. All my stats on the backend – other than “Hall of Fame” – are now empty. I made no changes to the site other than adding new posts.

Hey @ericsammons,

What’s your site’s URL? None of you guys shared it so it’s a bit difficult to tell what’s going on without seeing it in action.

That would help. ??

The site is https://mindspirit.com/. You can see the error on the sidebar on the right.

Note: I have Ajaxify widget enabled, but I did that only after I noticed the problem.

A screenshot of the widget setup can be found here.

Thanks @ericsammons!

Alright, please:

• How many visits does your site get per day? I see that Data Sampling is currently active which makes it a bit difficult to do some debugging at the moment ?? Please consider disabling it, or set Sample Rate to a value like 2 momentarily so I can check if the views tracking script is working or not (once we’re done you can set it back to 50 again).
• Go to Settings > WordPress Popular Posts and append &tab=debug to the URL in the address bar. Then, copy the contents of the Debug page and post it here.

All of a sudden it now shows 50 views to a single post – this just showed up a few minutes ago. I’m not sure what that means, but I answered your questions below.

We get a few hundred visits a day.

I’ve set the sample rate to 2.

Here are the debug results:

HP version: 5.6.30

PHP extensions: Core, date, ereg, libxml, openssl, pcre, sqlite3, zlib, bcmath, calendar, ctype, curl, dba, dom, hash, fileinfo, filter, ftp, gd, gettext, SPL, iconv, imagick, json, mbstring, mcrypt, mysql, mysqli, session, PDO, pdo_mysql, pdo_sqlite, standard, posix, pspell, Reflection, Phar, SimpleXML, soap, exif, tokenizer, wddx, xml, xmlreader, xmlrpc, xmlwriter, xsl, zip, memcache, cgi-fcgi, apcu, mhash, apc, Zend OPcache

Database version: 5.6.32-78.0-log

InnoDB availability: YES

WordPress version: 4.8.2

Multisite: No

Active plugins: (mt) Mail 1.2, (mt) MediaTemple System Plugin 0.4, 15Zine – Functionality 2.2, All-in-One WP Migration 5.41, Better RSS Feeds 1.0.8, Bloom 1.0.5, Category Specific RSS Menu v2.0, Chartbeat 2.0.6, Code Snippets 2.6.1, Contact Form 7 4.4.2, Custom Post Type UI 1.3.4, Disqus Comment System 2.85, Duplicate Post 2.6, Envato WordPress Toolkit 1.7.3, Featured Images in RSS w/ Size and Position 1.3.7, Google Analytics Dashboard for WP 4.9.3.1, Login With Ajax 3.1.6, MailChimp for WordPress 3.1.7, Managed WordPress Migration 1.2, Mind & Spirit 2015.12.23, P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler) 1.5.3.9, Password Protected 2.0.3, Recent Posts Widget Extended 0.9.9.5, Registration Honeypot 1.0.0, Rich Text Excerpts 1.3.3, Share Buttons by AddThis 5.3.5, Simple Image Sizes 3.1.0, Simple Links 4.2.0, Simple Local Avatars 2.0, Smart Custom Fields 1.7.0, Social Media Feather 1.7.11, Tracking Code Manager 1.10.12, Ultimate Posts Widget 2.0.5, Video Thumbnails 2.12.1, WordPress Popular Posts 4.0.8, WPFront User Role Editor 2.12.4, WP User Avatar 2.0.7, Yoast SEO 3.2.5

Theme: 15zine (2.2.1) by Cubell

@ericsammons you were either using a really old version of the plugin, or MediaTemple has recently started forcing your site to use WPP’s Data Sampling, or you enabled the feature without really knowing how it worked hehe.

Since your site gets “only” a few hundred visitors per day (and I say “only” because you get more visitors than I do hehe), you don’t really need having Data Sampling enabled. Either disable it or set Sample Rate to 1 (I recommend the former), at least until you start seeing around/over 100k visits a day.

I think I was using a really old version of the plugin – I hadn’t updated it in a long while.

Thanks for the help – it seems to be working well now!

Awesome ??

Now let’s wait for the OP to report back about his situation as well.

Hi Hector,

I just noticed a new behavior on my site for your Plugin.

I’ve always set the widget time range for the “30 days” so even if the period was short, the best landing pages were always listed in the list.

Today, I just saw that my top articles (in terms of views) were not listed at all. Only the recent ones were in the list.

I went into the plugin settings and changed the time range for a custom 60 days.
This is what the graph shows me:
https://www.awesomescreenshot.com/image/2913587/2bd1c4d3660c9ebb2e4f5a8d6cd5b11f

What happened on September 20? Did the plugin update reseted the articles views count?
My top pages are still receiving a lot of trafic, so the site is fine and all plugins are up to date.

Let me now if you need more info to investigate.

Thanks ??

Hey @jaylacroix!

Please follow these and the second part of these instructions so I can help out ??

The site gets about 3000 pagesviews a day.
Data sampling is disabled.
Site is https://www.pierrelacroix.com

DEBUG STUFF:
——————————

PHP version: 7.0.24-1~dotdeb+8.1

PHP extensions: Core, date, libxml, openssl, pcre, zlib, filter, hash, Reflection, SPL, session, standard, cgi-fcgi, igbinary, msgpack, mysqlnd, PDO, xml, apcu, apc, bcmath, bz2, calendar, ctype, curl, dba, dom, enchant, mbstring, fileinfo, ftp, gd, gettext, gmp, iconv, imagick, imap, interbase, intl, json, exif, mcrypt, memcached, mysqli, odbc, pdo_dblib, PDO_Firebird, pdo_mysql, PDO_ODBC, pdo_pgsql, pdo_sqlite, pgsql, Phar, posix, readline, recode, shmop, SimpleXML, soap, sockets, sqlite3, sysvmsg, sysvsem, sysvshm, tidy, tokenizer, wddx, xmlreader, xmlrpc, xmlwriter, xsl, zip, ionCube Loader, Zend OPcache

Database version: 5.5.57-0+deb8u1

InnoDB availability: DEFAULT

WordPress version: 4.8.2

Multisite: No

Active plugins: Akismet Anti-Spam 4.0, Auto Post Thumbnail PRO 1.3, Easy Digital Downloads 2.8.10, Easy Digital Downloads – Currency Converter 1.2.3, Easy Digital Downloads – Free Download 0.2.0, EDD Email Templates Customiser 1.2, EDD Receipts BCC 1.0, Enhanced Text Widget 1.4.6, Google Analytics for WordPress by MonsterInsights 6.2.4, kk Star Ratings 2.6, MailChimp Forms by MailMunch 3.0.6, PixelYourSite 5.0.8, Redirection 2.8.1, Simply Exclude 2.0.6.6, SoundCloud Shortcode 3.0.2, SumoMe 1.27, Widget Context 1.0.5, WordPress Popular Posts 4.0.8, WP-Mail-SMTP 0.10.1, WP Notification Bars 1.0.1, WP Rocket 2.10.10, WPS Hide Login 1.2.1, WP Smush 2.7.6, Yoast SEO 5.7

Theme: Responsive (1.9.3) by ThemeID by CyberChimps.com

Thanks @jaylacroix!

In your particular case, I think the “culprit” may be WP Rocket.

• Did you clear WP Rocket’s cache after upgrading WPP as instructed on the changelog?
• How often does WP Rocket’s cache expires / rebuilds?

• This reply was modified 7 years, 4 months ago by Hector Cabrera. Reason: Fixed typo & added @ mention

Nope, I did not clear WP Rocket’s cache. Next time I’ll read all the update notes.
Adnd WP Rocket clears cache each time a post is created or modified.

But, I just did and set back the widget time period to 30 days… but I still see only the most recent published articles.

Any idea?

How do you explain the sudden drop of views in the graph?

How do you explain the sudden drop of views in the graph?

For some reason WPP’s tracking script (tracking.js) isn’t being printed on the header section of your pages (which is why I knew you were probably using a caching plugin), and so it can’t track visits to your site.

Caching plugins in general save a “copy” of your posts & pages for a fixed amount of time before rebuilding / flushing the cache. This is good because it reduces the number of requests to the server, the downside is that if there were any changes while these pages were cached these may not be reflected on your site until the next time the cache is rebuilt/cleared.

If WPP’s script doesn’t get printed into the cached version of a given page, well, WPP won’t track it until the page gets rebuilt again by the caching plugin (WP Rocket in your case). This is the reason why you should flush WP Rocket’s cache every time something changes on your site (WordPress upgrades, plugins upgrades, theme upgrades/changes, etc), not only when you publish new articles or edit existing ones.

Another possibility is that WP Rocket’s cache doesn’t get refreshed as often as it should. Plugins that use WordPress Nonces to add security to its actions (such as WPP, Contact Form 7, etc.) might fail to perform them if the cache lifespan is too long.

• This reply was modified 7 years, 4 months ago by Hector Cabrera. Reason: Fixed typo