kieranbarnes do you know where your towel is?

Crawl Rate Tracker and Wordpress 2.5

I really like Patrick Altoft's Crawl Rate Tracker Plugin for Wordpress. I rolled it out on many of my sites and more of my client's sites. I even used it on this site.

But my love for it was prematurely cut short.

It's a very clever plugin, it tracks the spiders from the 3 main search engines, Yahoo, Google & MSN and provides you with a flashy Flash chart on how the search engines are crawling your Wordpress powered site.

But it works brilliantly in Wordpress versions pre 2.5, and appears to work equally as brilliantly in Wordpress 2.5, but wait!

I uncovered a major flaw in it, completely by accident. I was testing some of my own code for a client that required me to browse the site pretending to be the GoogleBot. (I use the User Agent Switcher Addon for Firefox). In a nut shell, when GoogleBot, or any other search engine accesses your pages, it throws a Wordpress/MySQL error that you will not see in a normal browser.

Table 'wordpress.wp_sbtracking' doesn't exist.

Googling it suggests other people are having a problem. Funnily enough one of my client's blogs appears 5th on the list!

Currently there is no fix, so check, are you running Wordpress 2.5 and the Crawl Rater Tracker plugin? Even the author recommends disabling it for now.

Its quite embarrassing when not only do I bleat on about Wordpress security, and I mentioned how easy it was to upgrade to Wordpress 2.5. I'll get my coat.

Note: People upgrading to 2.5 should be fine, its new 2.5 installs with the problem.

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