We recently upgraded our site template from Joomla! Protostar to RocketTheme Audacity. We noticed that all of the counts on our social media were re-set back to zero. Are the counts stored in a table on the site or do they populate from communication with the social media directly (like Twitter or Facebook)? Is it possible that the new template has produced a conflict that caused the counts to change? If it is possible we would like to restore and maintain accurate counts. Thanks for your kind help and advice.

Hello Doug,

no there are no database involved. Data are retrieved by the social scripts directly by their networks.
Indeed seems incredible that changing a template has reflected on this aspect. Of course if a javascript conflict was going on, at least you should see the counter not working at all.
Having it working but reset from zero apparently makes no sense.

Greetings

John

Thanks John... How does the plugin associate an article to Twitter or Facebook and keep track of the counts?

The plugin doesn't associate articles to socials such as Twitter or Facebook. It's job is sending the link to the sharer, nothing more. Social networks as far as i know are working using articles URL. If URL are the same also data associated should not vary.

Well thanks very much for that insight. When we changed the template, we also changed some categories and menu items. Unfortunately I believe that means the original URL that was shared may be different than the current URL generated in the new site template. I can't think of any easy solution to get back the counts... but going forward I suppose new content will create their own counts.

This leads to one more question. When we feature an article it appears on the home page. If an article is shared from the home page, is that counted differently than from the URL of the actual article page? It's the same article, just appears for a short time on the home page while featured.

Yes, now this makes sense.
About the featured articles, the link shared normally is the same, despite the fact that the article is shown in the home page or inside an internal page.