Read again every month

Sites change without telling their consent tool: a plugin update adds a pixel, somebody pastes a chat widget into the footer. So once a month the plugin reads your pages again, the same way Read my site does, about 30 days after the last reading, whether you made it or the monthly one did.

It never changes your banner by itself. When it finds something new, the Dashboard says so: which services it found, which kinds of cookie your banner does not ask about yet (those are held back for everybody until it does), and which addresses from other sites are new (those go on loading until you hold them back under What is held back). One button, Add what was found, adds them to what the banner asks about and to your cookie list, and empties your page cache. It adds to what was found before: something the monthly reading did not see this time (because a page could not be read, say) stays as it was. The one exception is a last reading that found nothing at all. The banner then asks about every kind of cookie that is held back, and once something has been found it asks only about the kinds found, so the note says first which kinds it will stop asking about. Read my site again still replaces the whole reading, and clears the note.

A reading lists at most 50 addresses from other sites. When the last one found more, an address past those 50 is not called new, because it may be one that reading found and had no room to list; it is listed when you next read your site.

If adding it means the banner asks about a new kind of cookie, visitors who answered before are asked again about it (see Asking again).

When an update teaches the reading to look at more (as when it started looking inside pasted snippets), a last reading made before it cannot say that nothing is getting past, so the Dashboard asks you to read your site again. The monthly reading does not wait for the month then: the first daily check after the update reads your site, once, so something the earlier reading could not see, such as a pixel pasted into a page, is named on the Dashboard within a day, with Add what was found. If it finds nothing new and reads every page, the Dashboard says nothing is getting past again.

The plugin tells a reading made before 1.3.0 from a later one by what was kept with it. Where it cannot tell, it counts the reading as the older kind, so the Dashboard asks you to read your site again and, with the monthly reading on, your site is read once more at the next daily check. If Read my site cannot read every page, the pages it could not read keep what the earlier reading saw, and the Dashboard says that some pages were last read by an earlier version rather than the whole reading. The monthly reading and wp cookie-consent scan wait for every page however long it takes, so they can read the pages Read my site ran out of time for.

A page that answers "not found" (404 or 410), such as a cart page in the bin or a page kept as a draft, is not there for your visitors either, so it does not stop the Dashboard saying your site is up to date. A page that turns the reading away with another error, such as a security rule's "forbidden" (403), a busy host's "too many requests" (429) or "unavailable" (503), is there for your visitors, and so is anything pasted into it. It keeps what the earlier reading saw there, as a page that ran out of time does, for as long as it turns the reading away, however often your site is read. After Read my site, the Dashboard and What is held back name the page and ask you to read your site again once your host or security plugin lets the reading in. The reading asks your own server for each page as a visitor who is not signed in, with the user agent Traslatability Cookie Consent scanner. What is held back and wp cookie-consent scan name every page that answered the last reading with an error, so you can put the page right.

If the monthly reading could not read any of your pages, or your host stopped it part way, the Dashboard says so, with a link that reads your site there and then, and it is not tried again until the next month. The link shows the reason; the usual one is a host that stops a site reading its own pages. A reading, the monthly one or yours, gives up when two pages cannot be reached at all before any page has been read (each is given 15 seconds), so Read my site answers with that reason rather than running on until something between you and your site gives up first. For the same reason a reading spends no more than 45 seconds waiting for pages however slowly they answer. The pages it has not reached by then are not read; after Read my site, What is held back says how many, and the command line prints it. Read your site again when it is quieter to read them all. A monthly reading that stops this way offers what it did find, and takes nothing away.

If Read my site or wp cookie-consent scan cannot read any page at all, because every page timed out or answered with an error, what the last reading found is kept as it was, so the banner goes on asking what it asked. What is held back says when that reading was made, the error it met, and that what was found before is kept. Press Read my site again once your pages can be read, and that note goes.

If your host stops a site reading its own pages, switch the monthly reading off: Settings → What it does → Read the site again every month. It is on for every site, and does nothing until the site has been read once.