XF 1.3 Current Visitors shows many people viewing same page, incorrectly

[sforum]

When I click Members > Current Visitors, it defaults to the first tab of Everyone and shows a big ol' list of members, guests, and bots viewing various pages/locations.

I have noticed many of them showing the same value, which is a hidden node that I use as a custom 404 page.

I wondered why this was, so when I spotted a couple of members' names showing "Viewing page Visit mydomain.com" I contacted them to ask how they had ended up there. They both said that they had not been on that page, and didn't even know of it's existence!

Is this being misreported, or is something else afoot?

Thanks,

 

[Mike]

I would guess that you have some element on the page which is causing your custom 404 handler to be hit in the background. Could be an image, JS, etc.

 

[sforum]

I would guess that you have some element on the page which is causing your custom 404 handler to be hit in the background. Could be an image, JS, etc.

Hmm, thanks for the suggestion. Any idea how I might track down the rogue element?

Thanks.

 

[Mike]

You can use something like Chrome's network inspector/console to see what requests are triggering a 404.

 

[sforum]

You can use something like Chrome's network inspector/console to see what requests are triggering a 404.

I've been wading through the various options, looking for anything that mentions errors or 404, but can't find anything and don't really know what I'm doing.

Any tips/help?

Thanks.

 

[Mike]

I'm not seeing anything obvious, but when I started refreshing and looking at my location (once I was able to identify that it was me), the location was tracked correctly so the issue wasn't affecting me (Chrome and Firefox).

You'd likely need to look at your raw access logs. Presumably people are hitting invalid URLs and they're getting forwarded to your 404 page (which would then show them as on that page). It might be a question of identifying what the URLs are and dealing with it. (Take away the redirect temporarily so you can pull out the 404s more easily in your logs.)

 

[sforum]

I'm not seeing anything obvious, but when I started refreshing and looking at my location (once I was able to identify that it was me), the location was tracked correctly so the issue wasn't affecting me (Chrome and Firefox).

You'd likely need to look at your raw access logs. Presumably people are hitting invalid URLs and they're getting forwarded to your 404 page (which would then show them as on that page). It might be a question of identifying what the URLs are and dealing with it. (Take away the redirect temporarily so you can pull out the 404s more easily in your logs.)

Ah, thanks for the suggestion to look at the access logs - I think I've sussed it! Looks like I tried to get too clever with favicons/PNGs for individual devices, and there are loads of calls to PNG icons that don't exist, followed by a 404. I have removed all favicon messing now and will see how that affects things.

One thing I did notice, though - I'm seeing a lot of entries like this:

192.151.152.58 - - [04/Sep/2014:03:35:00 +0100] "GET /xf/index.php?events/english-pool-knockout.899/ HTTP/1.0" 404 7176 "-" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1) ; .NET CLR 2.0.50727 ; .NET CLR 4.0.30319)"

I used to use XenAtendo, but since @Jaxel stopped supporting it I uninstalled it before I upgrade my forum to 1.3.5. It looks as if calls to the old events are still being made, and whilst the threads are still there (and display as normal) the "events" are not, and are causing a lot of rogue 404s.

Is this a problem, do you think? Should I be taking any action?

Thanks for all your help and pointing me in the right direction.

 

[Mike]

That isn't a problem so I wouldn't worry about it. (It's unlikely that those URLs are hitting your 404 page; they'll just use the default XF one.)