Hi guys,
I've been having some issues with geotargeting lately. When I've been visiting my site from the US using NordVPN, it's been triggering the geo plugin "bots fallback country", so it's been serving the wrong geo content due to this. As it turned out, the IP address used by NordVPN from the US, is classed as "bots" by the geo plugin, hence why the fallback country triggered.
But what I also noticed is that the login and register buttons went missing on those pages that randomly got cached as bots fallback country. At first I though this too was related to the geotargeting plugin, but I actually think this is a separate issue.
Is it the case that when bots hit the page, wpforo login and register buttons are hidden from bots? If so, that would explain why they get cached as hidden when visiting from an IP that is considered a bot.
Otherwise I have no clue what is causing this. It ONLY happens when I visit from the US. Any other country, all is fine. The login/register menu links are always displayed correctly, so I don't think there is a general issue on the site.
The menu links are excluded from cache both in lscache and cloudflare.
Thank you
Hi,
That is good to know and it makes total sense. We've been trying to figure this out for months and initially thought it was an issue related to the geo plugin, but now I know for certain these are two separate things.
Is there any way to deactivate this if I want? When using NordVPN from the US it is in fact recognized as a bot and a lot of people use VPN when visiting our website.
Edit: if a bot with US IP cache a page (if possible), will the rest of the visitors from the US also see hidden login/register buttons? I assume not but need to ask since everytime I visit from US, some pages are not displaying these links.
Thank you
The links work fine if it's a real visitor using a real browser, and this does not depend on IP addresses. The functions only check for bots.
There are no hooks or settings to disable these functions.
@sofy ok, understood. However, you should maybe be aware that browsing with NordVPN from the US (and I have noticed it from France as well), it will be recognized as a bot I think. When I browse my site like that, some pages are cached and served without the login/registration links in the menu. Most other countries work fine and I never see this issue.