Returning visitors broken since update to 1.7

Hey there!

I hope someone can give me a hint what might be the reason for piwik not tracking the “returning visitor” any more… it used to work fine prior to 1.7, I just updated to 1.8 and was hoping it would fix this, but still no returning visitors…

thanks in advance for all help!

Richard

Is it working on the demo.piwik.org ?

Yes, it seems to work there… what do we learn from this now?

thank you for all help matt!

Can you please post a few screenshots showing the error in your piwik?

hey matt -
the thing is, there is no errors shown at all,
the returning visitors just arent recognized, so theres no little green dressed returning visitor icons in the “live” widget.
the returning visitors graph has dropped to zero, same with all return-related stats and graphs.
I guess you’ll agree thats not worth a screenshot here…

I run piwik @ wikiloops.com, have been really happy with it so far :slight_smile:

thanks so much for your time! I’ll go ahead and upgrade to 1.8.1 now…

edit:
successfully updated to 1.8.1, still no returning visitors…

please wait a few days and post a screrenshot of the report showing 0 returning and at least 100 visits so we konw for sure one would return, thx

I hate to be a pain,
but like stated in the threads title, this bug appeared when updating to 1.7 a while ago…

screenshots attached, with around 300 visitors a day, I’m sure there was someone returning since updating to 1.8.1.

I too have noticed this bug. I have a perfect example of it described below.

My website has a very low number of visits – I am one in a billion freelance English to French translators. I have anything between 0 to 30 visits a day, with an average somewhere between 3 and 6 visits a day.

The low number of visits makes it very easy for me to spot returning visitors in a 3 or 4 days span. In the screen captures that I am showing, the visitor used a phone to access (directly) my website, at 20:54. Two days later, at 21:50, they come back to my website, using the same IP and the exact same configuration as far as the information in the visitor log goes.

I would intuitively call this visitor a “returning visitor”. So I find the absence of the returning visitor icon strange. At least in the detailed visitor log, not in the “visitors in real time” widget.

hey amenel,
thx for supporting my cause here…
lets hope there will be a helping hint sometime!

I am also having this issue with the REST API. _ipvc etc doesn’t seem to do anything to show that its a returning visit.

Even have same problem with my website www.wemix.in
daily 500 - 600 visitors and now 40-50.

I shifted to another software “clicky”.

Never expected this from piwik people. they dont even listen.
see the attached picture.

in my piwik, these thigs not working :-

  1. returning visits.
  2. list of keywords.
  3. list of external websites.
  4. best search engine.

Please fix the issues…i really wanna shift tracking to piwik again
regards
RAVI DAHIYA
www.wemix.in
INDIA

Ravi, can you try disable / enable the DNT plugin?

It works for most users, but it seems a few really have trouble with less visits since last upgrade.

check your web server error logs and please enable / disable the DNT plugin, is it working again for new visits?

I guess “DNT plugin” is the “DoNotTrack” plugin in Settings > Plugins? Will disabling it cause the cookie I set in all my browsers to be ignored?

I have very low traffic on my website and having my own visits counted will throw the stats out of balance – in the specific case of my website. I wouldn’t like that.

Another possibility is that: are you using third party plugins such as GeoIP plugin? please try disabling all third party plugins as it might help!

I don’t use any “third-party” plugin. I just checked and there are no GeoIP plugins in Settings > Plugins. Maybe that other people having this issue have such plugins.

As to me, I always use a vanilla Piwik installation with the default configuration. The only thing I change with each upgrade is in /config/config.ini.php where I change “session_save_handler” from “files” to “dbtable” (I’m on a cluster).

I also just did a fresh vanilla install of 1.8.2 with no extra plugins. I didn’t do an upgrade, as this is the first time i’ve tried out piwik. Maybe there is something where a fresh install works differently than an upgrade from a previous version?

@aisaksen: does your post mean that you don’t experience the issue at hand?

@amenel: sorry that was unclear. I am also experiencing the issue where new visitors are not being tracked. I’m using the http API to register a new visit and its not working. I left out those details because I already wrote them earlier in the thread. My message was more to @matt.

guys, this is getting a little confusing here… my initial question was about RETURNING visitors, not new visits…

I have twice tried reinstallation by copying a freshly unzipped version to my server, but still no tracking of returners.

@matt: Is there a file or a group of files or folder where the returning visitor tracking code is to be found? Then I could do a more close checkout of things, could be some read/write permission setting ?! Knowing wich files are involved would ease the troubleshooting some…
OR could it be that the database changes made during 1.7 - period went wrong at some point and cause this bug? Where to look in the DB?
OR does returning visitor tracking rely on a cookie - then I’d try to find out if maybe the cookie name (propably including some domain reference) is referencing the wrong domain (might possibly be the case in my multi-domain setup… - and would explain why visits are tracked while return-cookie is rejected as third-party-cookie).

I have neither DNT nor third party plug-ins activated btw…

I am enuf of a developer myself to estimate how much you must have going on there, take your time, we will find the problem eventually. Big respect for all thats workin!

yes, the terminology is confusing. I didn’t mean a “new visit” to mean a “new visitor” but a “repeated visitor making a new visit”. So what I’m seeing is the same thing you are.