Guest 'views' appear in communities view log, despite authentication required

[Barry_W]

Hi All - Our service portal hosts several community forums, that can only be accessed (view or contribute) after logging into the portal.

When I check the logs on a monthly basis (sn_communities_view_log) i see several 'guest' entries, for various forums, threads and topics. I've run several tests, and as far as I can tell the forums cannot be accessed without authentication, so I'm puzzled as to why I have guest 'views' in the log. 

Has anyone else experienced this, or have any thoughts on what may be generating the entries?

Many Thanks.

[Eoghan Sinnott]

Hi Barry, 

I had experienced something similar with 'Guest' views showing on our Knowledge Base, even when we required authentication to be able to view. After a bit of investigation and guesswork I was able to (99%) attribute it to users who were viewing the page, had left it open and become inactive and it later seemed to log a Guest view, either on refresh or some other activity.

I tested this with a few users asking them to open an article and leave the tab open. I was able to see in the search log that they had viewed an article, it recorded a view for that user, and some time later a "Guest" view appeared in the history. 

Hoping this may be of some help to you and you can try something similar.

Eoghan, 

Please consider marking my reply as Helpful and/or Accept Solution, where applicable. Thanks!

[Barry_W]

Thanks Eoghan. That's an interesting idea, and definitely one i'll follow up on. I have quite a large volume of guest views, so may be tricky to test, but worth investigating.

[Dave Littlejohn]

I noticed similar behavior during my investigation.