Excellent plugin but one big issue

That sounds like you’ve got a problem with your database server as nothing WP Statistics should be able to crash it.

1. I can’t reproduce the problem with “no matching widget” on Top Visitors, but that’s part of the JavaScript code and doens’t have anything to do on the server side. MySQL is designed to handle competing requests and letting it decide how to balance them is the right way to do it.

2. You can control how long a visitor is considered “online” in the settings.

3. Timestamps are not recorded for visits, except the last one, which is how we determine the online status of a user.

4. We’re a statistics plugin, not a user tracking plugin, we don’t record that kind of information about users and have no plans to.

Thank you for the reply.

Apparently, I am not alone with the same problem and there are more similar issues. If you think the problem is with my DB server, do you have any suggestion what setting could be wrong and how is it possible everything else works without problems? It is a fresh Apache+PHP+mySQL+WordPress install and visitor database is almost empty (just a few test visits). If you have any suggestion I can change every possible setting to try to make plugin work all the time.

2.

You can control how long a visitor is considered “online” in the settings.

Do you mean Check for online users every: 30 Second, Time for the check accurate online user in the site. Now: 30 Second setting? Why would the time between 2 checks affect the number of users detected. E.g.:

time = 0, users = 0
time = +5 s, user arrives on site
time = 30 s (check), user is detected, users = 1
time = 60 s (check), user is still at the site so count should still be 1 and not 0 regardless of the time between two checks setting

3.

Timestamps are not recorded for visits, except the last one, which is how we determine the online status of a user.

Here you said:

The time stamp is in the database but there is no UI to view it at this time.
can you add one in?
It’s on the list, but a low priority at this time.

4.
You don’t have to track the user to show how the users are browsing the site, e.g. what was their path to find some of the posts/pages. That information is very helpful to improve the site structure.

The overview page underwent a major rewrite in 10.0, so older posts about it not loading are no longer applicable.

There are a few reports of issues, but in general the vast majority of installs seem to be working fine. When the root cause is found it has always been something specfic to the site.

2. Yes, that’s the setting. It controls how long to wait between page refreshes from the user before considering them “offline”. We don’t execute any client side scripting so if we don’t see a return visit within this timeline, we consider the user to have gone offline.

3. I was refering to the last timestamp only.

4. Pretty much by definition, tracking how a user browses the site is tracking users, there are other plugins that can do that, WP Statistics doesn’t.

I shall try to find out the exact cause of what I described. If the problem is with the server configuration I believe sooner or later some other plugin will also experience the troubles.

2. If that is so, maybe you should consider adding the note because user can not figure out that information by reading the setting description. The note could/should be something as: ‘Please note if the user arrives at site, after xy seconds they will not be anymore detected as ‘online’ nor will anymore be shown in the Online count.’.

3. So you were planning to implement the UI to show the time of arrival for just the last visitor?

4. I must admit I don’t quite understand. Correct me if I am wrong: the plugin tracks the visitor’s IP address, it can geolocate the visitor, it tracks how exactly (from where) the visitor got to the site (the plugin tracks the referrer) and it even tracks the search string visitor typed to find the site – and all that is not considered ‘tracking’, but the information if the visitor visited:

page1 --> page2 --> page3

or

page1 --> page3 --> page2

within the site is considered tracking??

2. The admin manual is a little clearer on this, but yes the note could probably be better.

3. It’s not high on the priority list.

4. There are always tradeoffs, you can select to hash the IP address and by default geo-location is disabled. The line isn’t black and white so there’s always a question of what is and isn’t tracking, this is where we’ve drawn our line.

There are always tradeoffs, you can select to hash the IP address and by default geo-location is disabled.

That way could be implemented to enable/disable local tracking as well. But OK, it is your decision.

The line isn’t black and white so there’s always a question of what is and isn’t tracking, this is where we’ve drawn our line.

I understand. But the situation is similar to:

1. We will make a very fast car with built-in anti-radar system so the driver could drive very fast not to be caught for speeding.

2. We will disable the car radio to enhance the driving safety.

There is no point in enhancing the driving safety by disabling the radio if the safety has alrady been compromised by #1.

Similarly, you cannot improve the visitor’s privacy by not enabling to record his browsing path after he arrived at the site – when you’ve already collected all his critical data (IP, location, how he got at the site, what he typed in the search field, …). The visitor’s privacy has already been compromised when he arrived so you can’t say: ‘OK, I tracked all the data about the visitor but now I will give him some of his privacy back by not tracking him furthermore.’. Because that ‘furthermore’ tracking would be very minor to what was already tracked when the visitor arrived at the site.

I am not saying the plugin is not good, it is really a great plugin and I’ll leave 5 star review as soon as I’ll be able to make it work. The idea to have stats without using external services is really great, however there is still room for the improvements.

Best regards