ulim

Ok, thank you very much for making this effort and I will report back once the new version is out.

Kind regards,

Ulrich

Hello,

Thank you for verifying the problematic behavior that I am encountering myself. It seems that I did not explain the problem clearly enough, so let me try again:

I would like to find the days with the most, second most and third most traffic in the last year. Previously I could display the data for one year and hover over the highest points in the graph and that day’s data was displayed.

This feature was removed.

The data is now averaged over a period of time, whereas previously it was displayed “as is”. If I want to get daily data, I have to display every single month of a year, which is obviously completely tedious to do 12 times in a row. And what if I enter a custom range over 2 years? I need to go through 24 months one by one and write down the three highest days and then consult my piece of paper to find among the 24×3 days I noted the three highest ones manually. I mean, that can’t seriously be asked of the user of a digital product.

The yearly graph is now useless to me. It does not display anything of interest – basically it is just a smoothed out, straight line that trails off towards the end, because we don’t have the December data yet. But this display also skews the November data (and probably January as well), which I find completely nuts:

So, is it possible to get the old graphs back? Maybe as a paid feature?

I can confirm that it is now fixed.

Many thanks,

Ulrich

Hello @amirfallah

The page is called “Visitor Insights” and the tab on that page is called “Views” and the chart in question is called “Traffic Trends”. From the overview page I can get there by clicking on “Daily Traffic Trend Report”. The URL is wp-admin/admin.php?page=wps_visitors_page&tab=views.

The chart shows two curves: one in purple for “Views” and one in blue for “Visitors”. The curve for “Views” seems normal, but the one for “Visitors” is flat until June 9th (the value, when hovering over that part of the curve, always shows as 0) and on June 11th it continues normally (meaning that the values are in line with what we usually have).

On June 10th, while the value is not 0 anymore, it appears to be much too low. Perhaps I upgraded the plugin at a certain time that day and only the visitors after the upgrade are shown.

Is this description clear enough or do you want me to send a screenshot? I’m not sure if I can post that publically, but I can send it via mail.

Kind regards

Hi @cteduard

you don’t have to agree with me, but you are kidding yourself if you really think that you are not trashing old hardware. A large number of Macs does not support any OS beyond Mojave and thus are stuck with Safari 14. And many newer Macs could theoretically be upgraded beyond Mojave, but 32 bit software won’t run on newer OSes than that and so they are stuck as well. There are many 32 bit applications out there that either will either not be updated to 64 bit or the users don’t have the money to pay for the upgrade – think about developing countries here. There is a lot of old hardware being used in Africa etc. and I’m sure those users would love to upgrade, but can’t afford it.

Granted, the cost of sustainability (i. e. keeping old cars on the road) can become unsustainably high. But we are all called upon to at least make an honest effort. I trust you have looked into this specific issue and deemed it too expensive to fix. But perhaps your position would be more relatable if you communicated those findings.

Well, if I upgrade my OS and browser, it won’t help my visitors that are using older hardware. What’s more, they aren’t even aware of the problem and how could they? Safari 14 was released on September 16th 2020, so it has not even turned four years old. I think we all should make a much better effort to create sustainable products. Do not trash the old hardware, if it still works – albeit with an older OS. It saddens me to see an unreflected throwaway mindset. Also, in many developing countries older hardware is being recycled – don’t lock out these users is my opinion.

• This reply was modified 2 months, 3 weeks ago by ulim.

Thanks for pointing that out, it’s the newest browser available for my OS (10.14.6), which seems to not be supported by Firefox anymore.

It does not work either in a private browser window. I’ll try it on Linux tomorrow.

Clearing the cache did not help. Firefox version is 115.14.0esr on Mac OS.

Thank you very much for your comments and the blog post.

Kind regards,

Ulrich

Hi Navid,

as you have said, tracking through server logs only requires consent, if PII is logged. Since as the server administrator I have full control over what goes into the server log, I can fine-tune whether I need to ask for consent and in which form or perhaps not at all.

While I’m sure that your JavaScript does this job way more professionally than I, since the people behind it are way more knowledgeable than I, it is still something that I am outsourcing to a third party and that comes with its own legal challenges.

So when I started the website for our museum, I was looking for a tool that would go over my anonymized server logs and simply analyze the traffic. I am interested to know, for example, which pages are most popular and how many visitors I am getting overall and whether that amount increases over time or after the publishing of new articles.

To be honest, every third party tool is one that I don’t control and that might be updated to different functionality at any time – as we are seeing right now. But I feel comfortable to point a third party tool towards my server logs, because I control what’s in them. I have no qualms with client side tracking for those, who need it and responsibly employ it, but for myself will stay with server log analysis.

I’m not sure how you plan to monetize the new feature, perhaps server log tracking can remain as a paid option. If it’s a one-time payment, I’d be in with that (but I don’t do subscriptions – nothing to do with you, but I generally don’t do them, because if I would get a subscription for all 100 tools that I use, I’d be overwhelmed to manage all those legally binding contracts).

Kind regards,

Ulrich

Hello Navid,

thank you very much for your comments. I am certainly not an expert, so please feel free to correct me, if I’m wrong. But if I understand you correctly, then there will be a browser-side Javascript running, which raises serious accessibility questions. Many special devices, like screenreaders or embedded devices, do not support JavaScript. Furthermore, I do not see how I could run code on the user’s computer and access his local data without informing him and asking for consent.

In my case, and I’m sure for many others as well, the current level of accuracy is absolutely sufficient. We need to know how much traffic our site gets and what kind of traffic it is, but we do not want to throw out any users, just because of their preferences or personal predicaments. Which could vary between biological disabilities to an unstable political situation.

Kind regards,

Ulrich

Hello @eduard

thank you very much, now it works! I did not know there is another global setting for enabling comments in the Customizer. I did enable comments globally under Settings / Discussions only.

@eduard, I can do that, but the file is 577 MB. I suppose you don’t really need all the images etc. but I don’t know how to export a smaller file.

Hello @eduard,

I have no plugins related to comments except Antispam Bee and I deactivated it. I also don’t have any extra code snippets, only some additional CSS. But that would only hide the comments, but not remove them from the page entirely.

For example, on this page there is an element with id “comments”:

https://www.hostpress.de/blog/gutenberg-der-wordpress-block-editor/

But on my page this id does not even exist. There is only a comment-reply JavaScript.

I can confirm that it works again, many thanks!

Ulrich