Questions about the Karma plugin

[RJH]

I just installed the Karma voting plugin a few days ago and have some questions about how it works.

How does it count "hits" and how accurate is it?

How does it monitor who votes so they cant vote again?

The reason I ask is that plugin indicates a lot more hits than my Sitemeter account does. One story I posted 24 hrs ago supposedly has almost 700 hits and 230 votes. I find this suspicious because my Sitemeter account says I have had just over 150 visitors total in the last 24 hours for the entire blog.

Anyone have any info on this?

The story I mentioned is here:

http://www.thatpoliticalblog.com/serend ... igns!.html

[garvinhicking]

Hi!

How does it count "hits" and how accurate is it?

A hit means one pageview on the entry detail page of any browser user agent (including search engines other than Google). Multiple hits to the same page of the same person count multiple times.

How does it monitor who votes so they cant vote again?

A cookie tracks a cast vote. If a cookie exists, no more votes are allowed. If no cookies exist, voting is forbidden.

Evil users can still alter their cookies so that they can vote again. Multiple voting after another can be blocked throug the plugin'S config using a delayblock.

Votes are formatted in a way that should prevent spiders and bots to click the vote button.

If spambots are able to parse a javascript "location.href" command, then they could also execute votes (if they also submit a HTTP cookie to the blog).

In detail: The karma tracking is as accurate as it can be. But it still doesn't make the plugin absolutely accurate. There's a lot of margin for errors and potential miscounting. Also sitemeter has the same problem, they can't count every visitor properly. There are means to try to circumvent that, but no web statistic software can be accurate.

Best regards,
Garvin

[RJH]

Ok, that makes sense. Thanks very much for the information.

[blog.brockha.us]

A hit means one pageview on the entry detail page of any browser user agent (including search engines other than Google). Multiple hits to the same page of the same person count multiple times.

I'm not sure, if this is true.. After saving an article some days ago late at night, the counter increased to nearly 500 in a few seconds. Viewing the counter the next morning, it was around 7000(!). I looked into the logfile of the server and didn't find 7000 hits. 50 hits would be more realistic..

But this was the first article with a counter increasing that fast. All other counters look much more realistic. Perhaps the server logfile is not logging everything? I don't know, what's up with this single article..

[garvinhicking]

Hi Grischa!

I think that was the article with the golem trackback, right? Maybe visitors from golem or crawlers indexed your entry like that?

Another idea would be that you have some internal s9y plugin that calls an article multiple times? Can you reproduce the behaviour, maybe by patching the karma plugin to log each hit and the PHP calltree that lead to that hit?

Regards,
Garvin

[blog.brockha.us]

I have more than one article with a golem trackback, so this can't be the (single) reason for it..

I will look into it deeper, if I have extra time for it. As it was the only article with this funny counter increasing, I think/hope, it's not a real problem.

[RJH]

I grabbed a handful of screencaps from just 2 pages of my blog showing crazy vote counts.

[garvinhicking]

Hi!

In what regard are they crazy? They look normal to me.

A vote can be cast WITHOUT people clicking the detailed entry (which would relate as a "hit"). So it can be normal that you have more votes than hits.

Also, karma can be negative,if more people clicked a negative value than people clicked a high value.

Regards,
Garvin

[RJH]

Hi!

In what regard are they crazy? They look normal to me.

A vote can be cast WITHOUT people clicking the detailed entry (which would relate as a "hit"). So it can be normal that you have more votes than hits.

Also, karma can be negative,if more people clicked a negative value than people clicked a high value.

Regards,
Garvin

I dont have anywhere near that many visitors daily to my blog. On a very good day maybe 150-200 visitors. And those votes all happened on the same couple of days. As an example yesterday I had 99 visitors according to Sitemeter. And it is pretty accurate as I also used HiStats for a while and they were always within a couple of hits of each other.



And I realize the karma numbers are cumulative but like I said those votes all happened in a 24-48 hr period. I have one particular story that showed almost 700 hits and 230 votes in 24 hours.

I just had an online advertiser ask to run text ads on my blog ($30 for 1 ad for 1 year on each of 4 articles for a total of $120) and Id love to be able to point to those numbers as accurate.

[garvinhicking]

Hi!

Have a look at your apache server logfiles. There MUST be hits to the karma rating URLs. Otherwise those votes can't happen. It might be some automatted bots running loose on your page.

You could enable the logging of the karma plugin and then inspect the serendipity_karmalog table. There you'll see each vote and from which IP it occured by.

Best regards,
Garvin

[RJH]

I tried vote logging before and I get an email showing this error for every vote:

INSERT INTO serendipity_karmalog
(entryid, points, ip, user_agent, votetime)
VALUES (1347, 0, '68.183.148.244', 'Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0; SU 3.005; SLCC1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; Media Center PC 5.0; .NET CLR 3.0.04506)', 1187615436)<br /><pre>INSERT INTO serendipity_karmalog
(entryid, points, ip, user_agent, votetime)
VALUES (1347, 0, '68.183.148.244', 'Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.0; SU 3.005; SLCC1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; Media Center PC 5.0; .NET CLR 3.0.04506)', 1187615436)</pre> / Unknown column 'votetime' in 'field list'<br />

Thats using Internet Explorer 7. If I use Firefox I get another type of error but not in an email. This is the error I get:

Internal Server Error
The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.

Please contact the server administrator, support@supportwebsite.com and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.

More information about this error may be available in the server error log.

Apache/1.3.33 Server at www.thatpoliticalblog.com Port 80

[garvinhicking]

Hi!

Try to add a column 'votetime int(11)' to your karmalog DB table?

Regards,
Garvin

[RJH]

Hi!

Try to add a column 'votetime int(11)' to your karmalog DB table?

Regards,
Garvin

Might as well be talking latin for all that means to me, lol. Im a network admin but dont do anything with databases. I will see if a database knowledgable friend can help. Thanks for the info.

[garvinhicking]

Hi!

You could also do that with a simple PHP script. If you remember me about that next week, I'll give you one!

Regards,
Garvin

[RJH]

Hi!

You could also do that with a simple PHP script. If you remember me about that next week, I'll give you one!

Regards,
Garvin

That would be very kind of you, thank you very much.