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Form views way too high

Gravity Support Forums » Plugin Support » Gravity Forms

  1. John Murray
    Member

    I'm running GF 1.5.rc2.1 on my site, http://www.johnmurray-realtor.com.

    While experimenting, I created a simple form and had it on a private page that was marked noindex, noarchive, nofollow. I was basically the only one who could have been viewing the form. Shortly after creation, my form views were in the hundreds when I may have looked at the page 2-3 times.

    A day or so later, I've since cleaned up the form and put it on my home page and in the sidebar of post pages. The same form now has over 2600 views.

    I'd love for that to be an accurate reflection of my daily web traffic, but it's not.

    I am running several plugins that may impact this. One is an IDX plugin for RE agents (basically pulls listings from an MLS) and the other is a RE-related plugin that ties in to API's for Yelp, Walkscore, etc for local information. I don't know those plugins are triggering multiple refreshes on a page while a browser is just sitting there. I'm also running, a caching plugin, W3 Total Cache.

    Any ideas what is causing such high view counts?

    Posted 13 years ago on Sunday December 19, 2010 | Permalink

  2. Chris Hajer
    Key Master

    Do you have access to Apache access logs to see if the page where the form is located is in fact getting accessed that many times, and if so where the hits were coming from? The noindex, noarchive, nofollow stuff will take care of the search engines indexing it or following links, but won't prevent access to the page. Maybe one of the real estate services is pinging that page, or you have a site monitoring service that is pinging the page.

    Posted 13 years ago on Sunday December 19, 2010 | Permalink

  3. John Murray
    Member

    Thanks for the suggestion. I did download the Apache access log for today. I don't have any site monitoring services installed.

    Since I now have the form on my homepage and on any post/page on my site that displays a sidebar, I can see from the log that that could explain the view counts if every GET request to one of those pages triggers the counter.

    However, how does that explain views on a private page when the form was new? I think I could probably create a new form that is only on a private page, and the view counts would quickly get into the hundreds. I would imagine this must be something odd with my setup, because otherwise the Conversion metric would quickly become meaningless.

    Posted 13 years ago on Sunday December 19, 2010 | Permalink

  4. Chris Hajer
    Key Master

    The site monitoring I was thinking of would be like pingdom or aremysitesup - something that checks to see if a site is up regularly, not something installed on the website. But any hits like that would be logged by apache, so you'd see them.

    Posted 13 years ago on Sunday December 19, 2010 | Permalink

  5. Carl Hancock
    Administrator

    We haven't had any reports of an unusual analytics with the form view stat. It's going to be something specific with your site, illinoisharley is correct in suggesting you look at your web logs to determine if that page is being hit multiple times. The count is incremented each time the form is displayed, so something is triggering the view counter. It wouldn't fire otherwise.

    Go to your Edit Forms page, then in another browser tab load the page. Does the count increment 1 time or multiple times? Test it out by loading the page and see what impact it has on the view count.

    Posted 13 years ago on Monday December 20, 2010 | Permalink

  6. John Murray
    Member

    Since I have the form on the home page at this point, it is being hit multiple times but nowhere close to the rate reported by GF.

    I did the test you recommended. From what I've read on the W3 Total Cache plugin, view counters aren't lost by the cache, but they don't show up immediately.

    So, in my test, a refresh of my home page followed by a refresh of the Forms page showed no increase in the counter. A refresh a few minutes later showed a jump in the count of 5. Is that 5 my refresh + other visitors? Hard to say. A better test is a new form on a private page that is marked noindex/nofollow/noarchive in the Genesis SEO settings. That page shouldn't be able to be reached by anyone, but in my original form, the view counter was in the hundreds within an hour after creating the private page, when my views would have been in the single digits.

    Posted 13 years ago on Monday December 20, 2010 | Permalink

  7. Carl Hancock
    Administrator

    If you are running W3 Total Cache that could be the issue. You need to setup your W3 Total Cache so that it ignore Gravity Forms related queries. Otherwise strange things can happen, because anytime an application needs live data if you implement caching it can cause quirks and issues to occur.

    There is a setting in W3 Total Cache database settings to ignore queries with a certain prefix. You need to add the rg_* to the ignore list. You need to include your database prefix as well so if your database table prefix is wp_ (the default) you would set it to ignore queries with a table prefix of wp_rg_*

    Posted 13 years ago on Monday December 20, 2010 | Permalink

  8. John Murray
    Member

    Thanks, Carl.

    I looked at my database cache settings for W3 Total Cache and wp_rg_ is already an ignored query stem. Since I gave you a login, did you do that or was that done automatically? I didn't do it manually. If you just did that, then this might be the problem. If not, that setting was put there automatically probably at the start, so it must be something else.

    Posted 13 years ago on Monday December 20, 2010 | Permalink

  9. Carl Hancock
    Administrator

    I haven't changed anything.

    I don't see anything that appears to be wrong. But nobody else is reporting this issue and the form view count/entry count code has in place for well over a year with no changes which means it's something specific with your site setup or server setup.

    Try deactivating *ALL* plugins and then test the view count functionality. Then activate each plugin one by one, test the view count functionality after each plugin you activate, until you encounter the one that causes the strange behavior.

    My guess is it could still be the W3 Total Cache plugin causing the issue. Caching can interfere with database interaction.

    Posted 13 years ago on Monday December 20, 2010 | Permalink

  10. hypenotic
    Member

    Some of this thread is going over my head. However, we have a similar issue.

    A client ran a site that was tied to a local election. For the duration of the site (around 3 weeks) they had a total of about 8,000 pageviews.

    One form that is situated on every page and also on it's own page, has over 20,000 view.

    How is that possible?

    Posted 13 years ago on Friday October 14, 2011 | Permalink

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