WordPress plug-ins lose business data

WordPress hosting is popular. Anyone who wants to create a website as a portfolio or start a blog comes across the name very quickly. Almost every hour our chat colleagues get a number of people in the chat with a question about WordPress. 28% of all websites on the internet use WordPress for their website or webshop. 500 websites are created every day with the popular CMS (Content Management System).

The problem with IPv6

However, an alarming problem has emerged for 200 plug-ins. And these plug-ins together have more than 1 million users. Data loss occurs when users use an ipv6 address. So you lose all the visitor data of those users.

The field for the database cannot accommodate more than 20 characters. An IPv6 address has a much longer format of 39 characters. When this is the case you will not get any further error message from this. Not even when you set the WordPress debug function to TRUE. So you can't easily be notified when this kind of error occurs. This was pointed out 2 years ago in the following forum post:

https://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/32315

WordPress itself has not yet resolved or responded to this. When the IP address is too long, not only the IP address is lost, but the entire dataset. This causes you to just lose all data from that visitor.

If you are using WordPress then you are using plug-ins. You can't escape them when you are working on your website. A plugin for your contact form or a plugin for your beautiful slider on the homepage. This will probably sound familiar. But not all of these plug-ins are equally well built or processed. The following list contains 200 plugins that suffer from the above bug.

How do I fix the problem?

Log in to PHPmyAdmin and change the database field of the IP addresses from a varchar 20 to a varchar 39 to avoid these problems.

If you use 1 of these it is recommended to look for an alternative. We also want to mention that WordPress is not the only CMS with which you can build a website. You have numerous options for this. We recommend always looking around in our knowledge base and otherwise start a conversation with one of our employees on the chat. We can often help you make the right choice.