Ben Cole

Interesting, social networks seem to be a bit strange with how they count shares. Let me know if you ever get it figured out.

Glad to know the issue is not with the plugin. For the one share that is missing, the plugin data does not update in real time – so I suspect that the one share will show up eventually, or you can click “Update Now” on that post on the reporting dashboard to trigger a manual update of the stats.

I’ve found that social networks are usually good about following minified URLs and correctly counting shares. Maybe try using a different URL shrinker and see if you get different results?

For testing, you can query Facebook directly to get the most up to date and accurate information about URL shares by going to this URL in your browser and replacing “https://www.www.remarpro.com” with the full URL to your post:

https://graph.facebook.com/fql?q=SELECT%20url,%20share_count,%20like_count,%20comment_count,%20total_count,%20click_count%20FROM%20link_stat%20where%20url=%27https://www.www.remarpro.com%27

Try the minified URL and see if by chance Facebook is attributing shares to that URL instead. Also try your URLs with and without a trailing slash, and with and without https:// and let me know if you discover anything.

Hi Frank,

Glad you like the plugin so far!

Can you tell me what version of the plugin you are using? Has the problem just started with your recent posts? I released an update on Friday which changed the way Facebook data is collected.

Do you see any connectivity error messages? The connectivity status is displayed in the upper right of the metrics dashboard. If you click on it, it will show you more details about each individual social network. Does it display anything unusual next to Facebook?

Lastly, can you manually check the share count of one of your posts by going to https://www.sharedcount.com and provide me with a link to one of your posts which does indeed have some shares but that are not showing up correctly in the plugin?

I’ve been trying to think of a good solution to this for a while. I am also planning to switch one of the sites I work on from HTTP and HTTPS and this issue has delayed the switch for me. I hadn’t thought of domain switches yet, but that is a good point to consider as well.

I wrote up an overview with a proposed solution and will start working on it. If you’d like to take a look, head over to this page:

https://github.com/chapmanu/wp-social-metrics-tracker/issues/45

Thanks for the feedback – the site I run has only about 5k posts, so I haven’t been able to see what happens when handling stat updates for 20k post yet.

I will work on finding a better way for the plugin to throttle updates so that older posts won’t get updated as often and so that newer posts update more quickly. I’ve known this would be an issue for large sites, I just haven’t had the time to implement a good way to handle it yet. I’ll try to get it done within the next month or two.

If you have any information about what a reasonable rate for updating stats would be, that would be helpful for me if you could share it. Specifically, how frequently can your server update post stats before there is a performance loss?

Glad to hear that the plugin is working out well!

I am using Disqus with this plugin; there is a feature with the WordPress Disqus plugin which syncs the Disqus comments back to WordPress by automatically copying over Disqus comments as native WordPress comments. This way the comment count is reflected in the Social Metrics Tracker plugin. Check to see if comment syncing might be disabled or not working with your Disqus plugin.

Thanks for the feedback on the update frequency – I do think it would be helpful to have more recent posts updating more frequently than older posts, especially for sites with a large number of old posts. So it will be on my radar within the next few months.

Thanks for the compliments!

I’ll add an option to override this, the next version will likely be ready in January.

In the mean time, if you need to override it, you can change line 98 in social-metrics-tracker.php to disable it:

public function is_development_server() {
     return false; // Changing to this will override it
}

I’ll definitely consider adding that in the future, I’ve never thought of sorting out the statistics by network.

Are you more interested in seeing that information on the admin dashboard, or being able to display it publicly as a widget on your site?

Hello mpfingsten!

I was able to optimize the reporting page to show all of the posts instead of just the top 30, and it will now show all of the posts in version 1.3.3 which I have just released.

Try it out and let me know if you have any issues!

Hello,

The plugin does track Facebook likes and shares, but it does not display that data in the reporting dashboard. If you have a way to access post custom meta fields, the two fields are socialcount_facebook_likes and socialcount_facebook_shares. In a future version I will try to make that data available in the dashboard.

As of version 1.3, the data is collected directly from each social network API; older versions of this plugin used sharedcount.com.

I have never thought about Social Login Analytics. You mean tracking what social networks site visitors are logged in to, right? What do you think would be valuable about that information and how could it be used? I will think about how that could be incorporated in future versions.

What is the connectivity issue with Pinterest? Is there any error message displayed?

There is no official roadmap for the plugin, but there are a bunch of tasks and issues on Github which I am using to come up with new versions.

Thanks for the feedback! Would love to receive a plugin review/rating if you found the plugin helpful.

Thanks, super awesome! I added your code to the plugin for the next version (1.3.3) which should be ready soon.

And actually, while I was there I realized that my WP_Query for the reporting dashboard was not properly using pagination parameters which is why it was slow when trying to increase the limit. So if the limit was set to 100, it would fetch and crunch numbers for all 100 posts, even though only 10 needed to be displayed on the current page.

I optimized the query, so limit can now always be set to “No Limit” since it will only process the items being shown on the page.

If you’re curious, here are your changes added to the code, and here are optimizations on the WP_Query

Oh, THAT’s what you meant by “only 30 posts”

Yes, I’ve been meaning to fix that. I found that with many posts, the WP_List_Table class seemed to really slow down and take forever to load if I tried to do a paginated table with more than a couple of pages. My quick fix long ago was to just limit the display to 30 posts, and I just never changed it.

So regardless of the number of posts tracked, the table will only show you the top 30 for your query. Even when you switch to “Show Posts Published Anytime” it limits to 30. But if you change the sort column, it will still show you the correct results, but only the top 30.

In a future version I’ll figure out a better way to handle that pagination…. or if you’d like to contribute on Github and send a pull request that would be awesome too! The whole “smt-dashboard.php” file is a bit messy and needs to be optimized in my opinion =P

Okay, could you try this version of the plugin and tell me if it fixes the issue?

https://share.bencole.net/v2/dir/temp-624/social-metrics-tracker-1.3.2-rc.zip

The plugin uses PHPs http_build_query to create the request URLs, and I read that in some versions that function uses ‘&’ instead of ‘&’ to build the queries. So I’ve manually specified that the separator should always be ‘&’ — try it out and let me know if it works and if so I’ll release the patch as 1.3.2

Hello,

I was just about to reply with instructions on how to do exactly what you just did to investigate the request/response.

Yes, I think you’re exactly right, that looks like it would be causing the issue. I will take a look at the plugin code today and see if I can figure out why the request is being formatted incorrectly with the ‘amp;’ and see if I can release another patch to fix it. It’s strange that it works on some servers but not others; clearly the ‘amp;’ should not be there though in the request, it’s probably getting encoded twice somewhere.

I’ve released version 1.3.1 which has a status indicator that will display error messages for specific social networks. Please try upgrading to this version, then check to see if there is some information displayed. After you upgrade, click “Update” next to any of your posts so that the plugin checks for new data at least once with the new plugin version.

When you are looking at the Social Metrics Dashboard, the indicator is in the upper right corner and will either say “Data is being synced in the background” or “Temporary connectivity issue detected. Click for details.” — if you click on it, it will expand to show any error messages collected from specific social networks.