Wordpress stuff, a statistics plugin, and jello

I’ve had reports of it for many releases now – data is lost from the totals table, for no apparent reason. I’ve seen it in the search terms people use to find my site and the kStats plugin, and I’ve had bug reports and numerous comments about it. Until now, I’ve never seen it happen and therefore had no basis to start my search in fixing it.

Well, after an entire week of testing 0.6.0 every day on my own blog to try and have kStats first major bug free release, I thought I was good to go. So I tagged it and dropped it in the repository earlier this evening, thinking “Finally!”.

Not an hour later, it happened.

My data was gone. All except for yesterday and the new hits coming in after midnight. Nothing was missing from the raw table or charts, something happened to truncate the totals (aggregate) information. The problem is, I still have no better clue what it was. It happened right after the wp-cron event for kStats was tripped, so I presume it has to be occurring during the cleanup routine. So I went in and debugged every query that was going on.

Every single query ran fine. I tripped the cron 7 times. Each and every time worked perfectly. So what the HECK is going on?

I’ve been banging my head against the walls and my dining room table for a few hours now trying to track it down. What good is a stats plugin that arbitrarily truncates data?! The only possibility I’ve come up with so far that seems remotely feasible is that it happens when a search engine or bot trips the cleanup – maybe they’re hitting a page and leaving so fast that it’s only getting part way into the process before it gets canceled?

So I just finished tagging 0.6.1, hopefully before too many people have already upped to 0.6.0. I added (and probably should have since day one anyways) ignore_user_abort() to the primary cleanup function to ensure that even if the page is exited before the script is done, it will follow through. I had this in the collector, I’m not sure why I didn’t put it there before.

If that doesn’t fix the problem, I’m going to turn the cron feature off and make it a utility on the Options page until the reason is tracked down. I would like to release a stable version. I can’t until this is worked out.

*sigh*

I doubt any of you script kiddiez even look at the sites you attempt to hack with your little botnet and RFI scripts, but in case you do, I just have one question for the lot of you;

Does your grandma know what you’re doing in her rent-free basement?

I’m sorry, I realize most of you probably live at home with mommy and daddy, and I shouldn’t be bringing your grandmother’s into this, but seriously. Half of you tried to attack my site with a phpBB vulnerability. I’m sorry, last time I checked, I was running Wordpress.

Put down the porn, sign off your favorite MMORPG, change your clothes and shower for once in your life and walk to the front of your house. There’s a big rectangle there with a little round knobby thing on it. This is called the front door. If you open it, there’s a life somewhere out there for you. Go find it.

You’re not getting root on my box, trust me. I’m sure a skilled hacker could if they put enough effort into it, but you’re not.

I don’t know who amongst my readers might have the skills and the time, but if you want to slap some children around with a big trout, here’s a few IPs from my logs;

61.63.10.150
64.6.232.171
194.105.193.46
209.216.213.119

Have a nice day!

FAIL.

My wife nearly passed out cold after we tried your energy shots Ed. They don’t work.

I came across the following post this morning, and decided to write a post about it (bored much?):

Hidden features of PHP? Stack Overflow

My first impression of this question is that it’s nothing more than another troll, given the authors criticism of PHP being shallow at best. I’ll bite.
Read the rest of this entry »