How do the link counters work?

Hi Piet,

Clicks are recorded when someone (or something, like a crawler) accesses the shortlink and gets redirected.

We have some more advanced analytics for that data coming up that would allow you to narrow down where these are coming from specifically. I’d guess crawlers at this point.

Kind regards,
Brecht

Hi Brecht,

Thanks for your quick response.

Then I am afraid there is a bug in the plugin, because most of these links have not been published and have therefore never been clicked on.
You can see from the screenshot that the link that was published 2 minutes earlier already had 7 clicks. As I also explained, I use your plugin in such a way that I add the shortlink generated by your plugin to some of my own code.

Piet

Have you been previewing the affiliate link? That counts as a click as well.
It counts a click whenever you reach the custom post type page (affiliate links are custom post types).

No Brecht, as I have tried to explain a few times now already, I have not previewed the link.

Look, do with it what you want to, this is a bug.

Not sure why you’re getting so hostile? I’m just trying to debug the issue which means covering all bases.

You mentioned you didn’t publish them yet, but you can preview things when they are still drafts. That’s what the “Preview” button is for in the top right when editing the affiliate link.

I’ve had no other complaints about this or experienced the issue myself, so my next question would be to try and deactivate all other plugins for a second and see if it happens then.

Also, once they are published they can be found by crawlers, even if you haven’t added the link anywhere else. Are you sure that’s not what happened?

As I said, I basically only use your plugin to generate the shortlink.

I use the link in other code.

Therefore publishing the link does not necessarily mean that the link is actually out there in the open.

Unless of course the links become public domain as soon as the Publish key is hit in the Easy Affiliates Add New Link screen?

Perhaps 'public' => true, should be set to false instead?
(/helpers/post_type.php L34)

• This reply was modified 8 years, 1 month ago by Pieter Bos. Reason: add filename and line#

As soon as you publish the affiliate link the shortlink is available and accessible by crawlers. It has to be public or your shortlink just wouldn’t work.

It doesn’t matter what you do with the shortlink after publishing. It now exists, so it’s accessible.

Okay.

I don’t think it is necessary to do it that way, but that’s a different discussion.

Just tested this on a dev site by changing the settings to:

'public' => false,
'show_ui' => true,
'publicly_queryable' => true,
'exclude_from_search' => true,

and links are still clickable.

• This reply was modified 8 years, 1 month ago by Pieter Bos.

I don’t think it matters if public is set to false if you set publicly_queryable to true anyway. Then it’s still accessible from the front-end.