hooking to track the view of a post/page

Why not just use google analytics or a similar service to track page views?

You may be seeing traffic from search engine bots like Google that are indexing your website. Most WordPress stats systems have the ability to filter our search engine bots.

This is the first thing that pops into my head when you say you are getting “ghosted” hits to a page or post.

You may find this article about the firing order of the hooks useful:

https://rachievee.com/the-wordpress-hooks-firing-sequence/

Thanks so far for your responses!

1. Yes, I do use Google analytics for page views.
2. Am afraid indeed that the ghost views are from search engine bots.

The reason I like to track the view of a post or page myself is that I like to show on the front page of my site the last viewed post or page. See https://curiozy.net

It would be a little weird when ‘ghosted’ views or other processes interfere with the integrity of it.

Hans

For those who are interested in how I use the add_action. Perhaps it gives an idea about a (possible) solution of the issue or an other approach to keep track of the last viewed post/page.

https://curiozy.net

add_action('wp','setLastViewed');
function setLastViewed() {
	$storeID = get_option( 'page_on_front' );
	$pageNotFoundID = get_option ('page-not-found');
	$LV_Url = get_site_url() . $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];
	$LV_ID = get_the_ID();
	if ( $LV_ID == $storeID || $LV_ID == $pageNotFoundID) {
		return;
	}
	$LV_Title = get_post($LV_ID)->post_title;
	$LV_PoP = 'post';
	if ( is_page() ) {
		$LV_PoP='page';
	}
	update_post_meta($storeID, 'LastViewedPoP', $LV_PoP);
	update_post_meta($storeID, 'LastViewedUrl', $LV_Url);
       	update_post_meta($storeID, 'LastViewedTitle', $LV_Title);
       	update_post_meta($storeID, 'LastViewedID', $LV_ID);

	// IFTTT "MAKER" TRIGGER FOR MESSAGING PHONE/WATCH WITH THE USE OF PUSHBULLET
	$time = current_time('H:i');
	$url = esc_url("https://maker.ifttt.com/trigger/lastviewed/with/key/mycodeishere/?value1=" . $time . ' ' . $LV_PoP . ' ' . $LV_Title);
	$ch = curl_init($url);
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, true);
	curl_exec($ch);
	curl_close($ch);
	// END-OF-TRIGGER "MAKER"
}

Hans, I am not a moderator, but I do know they prefer to keep the forum as clean as possible. In the future please post code using a service such as pastebin.

I have reviewed your code and it doesnt really seem to be an issue with your code. At least not to me.

If I were you I’d be checking the servers configuration!

Thank you Davood… never heard of pastebin ??

hans

No problem! Happy to help.

That’s what the support community is for.

True. It is a valuable good of the community.