Deleted Media file – but downloads in statistics

  • brechbuehl · Member ·

    Hi all,
    I erroneously uploaded a media file to my wordpress blog. I never had it linked in to any of my blog posts. It is a pdf file that contains some information that I do not want to share on the internet. Therefore I deleted it from my media library.
    Now I can see in the statistics, that the same media file gets downloaded twice or three times per day. This is weird, because I can not access the file from my blog, not from my media library. To my eyes it is completely offline. However it still gets downloaded.
    How can I make sure this file is gone for always?

    Kind regards

    The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)

  • kokkieh · Staff ·

    Hi there,

    When you delete a file from your library, it’s completely purged from our servers within a few hours. I can double check that for you, but to do that I need to know the media file URL for the file – the URL at which one can view the file directly in their browser.

    Also note that deleting it on our end will not remove it from cached copies of your site that might exist elsewhere on the web, for example, on search engine caches – someone could still access and download that file from Google’s cache, for example. The only way to have it removed from a search engine cache is to request it from the search engine directly.

    https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1663419?hl=en

  • brechbuehl · Member ·

    Hi kokkieh
    Thank you for responding.
    In the end I was able to reproduce the issue. As it turns out, it is not a privacy issue but an issue with the way wordpress creates its statistics:
    1: I upload a media file to the wordpress.com server.
    2: I view that media file on the wordpress.com server
    3: The statistics show the link to my mediafile in “File Downloads”
    4: I delete the media file from the wordpress.com server. According to your response this completely deletes the file from all wordpress.com servers
    5: I go back to statistics and the link to the media file, that supposedly is completely deleted.
    6: I click on the link to the file that still is shown on the statistics page.
    7: A new window opens with the message 404 file not found
    8: The statistics counter on the statistics pages counts one more hit to my mediafile. This one more hit goes on whenever I click the very link and get the 404 message displayed
    Conclusion: The statistics counter does not count the actual downloads. I counts the number of clicks on the link and it counts the 404 messages all the same as if the file were actually downloaded.
    Kind regards

  • staff-mckluskey · Staff ·

    Thanks for pointing that out @brechbuehl. I’ve been digging a little and it seems that it’s a known issue. It has already been reported to our developers so we hope to have a solution soon.

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