Your software
My Mautic version is: 4.4.2
My PHP version is: 7.4.30
My Database type and version is: MariaDB 10.3.34
Your problem
My problem is: I’ve been noticing for quite some time that my contact IDs are not sequential. They are always ascending and there are no duplicates, but the ID numbers will jump proportionate to the amount of time that has elapse between new contact additions. It appears that non-legit contacts are being created, which just represent IP addresses. I can see them by creating a segment that filters for contacts that do not fall into other segments. There are no details for the contacts, but they all have an IP address as a label instead of a contact name.
Is this a configuration issue or is this done for a reason? Is there a way to turn this off?
I currently have approximately 1500 legitimate contacts in my database and 10,000 of these non-legitimate contacts.
Those are so-called anonymous users. They get created for everyone who visits your page when tracking is on.
In “Contacts”, you can click on the little lock icon in the upper right corner (“toggle anonymous contacts”) to see them.
I always like to clean those up frequently, see Housekeeping: Help the Mautic Datenbank Stay Lean | Leuchtfeuer.com
No. Normally you want this in order to act on the behavior (e.g. in campaigns which try to convert anonymous visitors into known contacts).
If you really don’t want any information unless a contact is a known contact, you can easily achieve this:
create a segment with filter “email = empty”
create a campaign, use the above segment as starting point, and have only one action: “delete contact”
make sure to have your cron jobs set up to run the above as frequently as you like
