Sign in with Google temporarily disabled for this app

I have a client with this same exact issue. Was there ever any resolution?

I have the same issue. I cannot find any soultion ??

I have the same issue.

It would seem Troy Dean of VideoUserManuals took over development of this plugin? and on this page here, >>

https://www.videousermanuals.com/google-analyticator/

he asks that you direct support questions to this forum where we are.

“Please log all support tickets on the official WordPress support forum for this plugin so we can all share our knowledge. Any support emails sent to us will be ignored and you will be directed back to the support forums. Sorry to be so particular about this but we’d like everyone to benefit from answering support requests.”

So… hello, Troy? Where are you?

Uh-oh. Now that explains why, all of a sudden, tracking on most of my sites has simply stopped. It looks like what was ‘temporary’ became ‘permanent’.

All I can see on the logs is Google Analyticator trying to make an OAuth2 authentication call and getting

{
  "error": "invalid_grant",
  "error_description": "Bad Request"
}

as a result. This is consistent with the Sign in with Google temporarily disabled for this app message…

So… hmmm… does this mean that we have to switch to another Google Analytics plugin, again? ??????

• This reply was modified 4 years, 4 months ago by Gwyneth Llewelyn. Reason: Fixed one typo and one grammar rule!

I have a solution. It’s something we were already doing for other reasons, but an inconsistency in how I was doing made this bug bite me like it’s biting the rest of you, so now here’s some info that might help someone willing to put in some extra legwork.

Basically: This plugin uses the Google Analytics API to fetch data from GA into WP.

By default it does this for two main reasons: On initial setup it does it to authenticate and pull down your list of profiles (sites), so you can pick which site this is from the pulldown menu.

Later, it uses the API to fill the dashboard widget with up-to-date data.

(in my case, I have custom code that does OTHER things with this API, like fetch a list of popular posts or stats for a particular post).

The good thing is that once the plugin is set up with your profile ID, it should keep tracking visits unless you reset the plugin configuration, so lots of people are probably still using this fine and only the widget is broken.

So what’s the problem? The API requires you to set up an “app” in the Google Interface, giving you keys to set up your “app” (this plugin), but the keys this plugin uses have gone bad somehow.

The way Analyticator works with it’s app keys is super simple: The dev set up an app, and they put their keys into the PHP of this WP plugin (near the top of google-analyticator.php:

php
define('GOOGLE_ANALYTICATOR_CLIENTID', '1007949979410.apps.googleusercontent.com');
define('GOOGLE_ANALYTICATOR_CLIENTSECRET', 'q06U41XDXtzaXD14E-KO1hti'); //don't worry - this don't need to be secret in our case

This seems to have worked for awhile, but if you think about it it’s clear there’s risk of a LOT of problems. Want an example? Well my use of the API as described above to pull down extra stats like recently popular post was using too many calls because it was buggy, and ended up making the Analyticator “app” stop working for awhile because Google was throttling that account. I noticed this because my API calls stopped working, but it wasn’t just broken for me, it was broken for EVERYONE who uses this plugin! We all had to wait for Google to take the Analyticator app out of the penalty box just because of my actions on a single website. Not good!

So what’s the solution? Everyone have their own Analytics app and keys.

The immediate problem we’re actually facing is that the Analyticator “app” in Google is currently disabled for sign-in. Nothing we do will fix this. Maybe the developers got email about it and could do something to make it work again, but we are helpless. I don’t know what caused it, but honestly there’s a decent chance that it was the fact that thousands of people were using that “app” to log their sites in (i.e. using this plugin), and that’s not how Google wants those apps to be used. (See the code above, where it says “CLIENTSECRET”, then the developer wrote in a comment “don’t worry”. That’s a bit of a red flag, amirite?)

The way I solved my problem was to create my own app, then hack this plugin to allow me to override the default CLIENTID and CLIENTSECRET keys with my own personal ones. I did it to get around the API call limitations, but it ALSO works to avoid this problem with the blocked app that is breaking the plugin for everyone.

So why can’t I tell you how to make it work? I don’t remember how I created the app.

I’ve just spent like half an hour trying to reverse-engineer my API key and for the life of me I can’t figure it out. I looked through all the screens I could find and used google search and looked in several google accounts, but nothing I find looks like the CLIENTID and CLIENTSECRET that need to be replaced in this plugin.

And, because it’s actually working for me at this point, I am going to give up for now and hope that all these clues I’ve provided will help someone desperate to get this plugin working find the instructions for creating an app and getting the keys that will fix this problem. Good luck!

More notes

– I suspect the real answer for a plugin like this is that it forces you to create your own keys in Google before you can use it. It’s a pain in the butt, but probably necessary. A couple years ago Google Maps plugins like GeoMashup had to go through a similar transition and it was awful, but with a helpful guide from the plugin dev, it’s doable.

– If you manage to get your own app set up and put the keys in, it might still give warnings when you try to authenticate the plugin. Mine gave me a kind of “this app isn’t trusted, use the links below to go through with it anyway” message like you used to get on hacked websites in chrome. If you click the links it will work though, and you can get authenticated!

– Here’s the code you can use at the top of google-analyticator.php to override the definitions for the keys. If you do it this way, then you can just put your own define() definitions with your keys into wp-config.php rather than your copy of the plugin, ensuring you don’t lose your keys if the plugin updates (though you’d have to re-insert this code in the plugin file, which there’s no real way around). I submitted this code as an improvement to the plugin in the past, but clearly it was never implemented. This code is a real improvement to the plugin for all kinds of reasons, but the current situation really makes it shine:

php
/**
 * JERHACK: Check if clientid and clientsecret are defined before defining them so they can be overridden
 */
if (!defined('GOOGLE_ANALYTICATOR_CLIENTID'))
define('GOOGLE_ANALYTICATOR_CLIENTID', '1007949979410.apps.googleusercontent.com');
if (!defined('GOOGLE_ANALYTICATOR_CLIENTSECRET'))
define('GOOGLE_ANALYTICATOR_CLIENTSECRET', 'q06U41XDXtzaXD14E-KO1hti'); //don't worry - this don't need to be secret in our case

• This reply was modified 4 years, 4 months ago by Jer Clarke. Reason: add code fences