GlobalStats: Online Users, Today's Posts, etc. on Any Page
 

GlobalStats v1.0
6/26/05 :: futureal

What It Does
GlobalStats allows you to add some of the forum statistics to any page in your forums. The stats include:

- total posts
- total threads
- total users
- users currently online
- registered/guests currently online
- newest member

It also adds a new statistic:

- today's posts

Basically, you can display the same information from the "What's Going On" section of the forum index on any page.

How Does it Impact Performance?
The hack adds a single query to your forum index page and a single query whenever a post is made. However, both are INSERT queries; no additional lookup queries are required. I have tested this on my live forum with over 1.6 million posts and hundreds of active users and it didn't hurt performance.

Installation
There are four files to edit:
/index.php
/global.php
/includes/functions_newpost.php
/includes/init.php

For instructions, see the file.

Screenshots
Here it is in action on one of my forums, with all the stats in a header that shows up on every page.

On the index page: http://www.rctech.net/forum/index.php
On a child page: http://www.rctech.net/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=2

More Info
If there is a better way to make this hack, please share it. I dug around a bit and couldn't find anything. However, it's always possible that there was already a checkbox somewhere in the Admin panel that did this for us. :)

The "Today's Posts" counter needs to be incremented rather than queried because on sites with a large post table (such as mine) it becomes very expensive. With this implementation, we are only using INSERT queries (actually REPLACE INTO queries) via build_datastore().

If you have any feedback or problems, please let me know. Tested on a virgin 3.0.7 as well as my ever-so-slightly modified forum.

looks like a nice hack will install later today thanks

great work futureal I will definately use this on my forums.

Cool. My users definitely like this; I had it going back with vB2 but with it querying on every page and finally had to remove it because of performance problems. With the datastore working, it makes things like this a lot easier and more efficient.

It could also be easily extended to include other statistics, although I couldn't think of any others off the top of my head.

trying to download..

thankyou man

/me installs

can you add this to a Non VB page?

Well done nice hack ;)

Is there a way to add these kind of stats to non-vb pages?

cant get it to work, my usersonline shows up as 0, actually all my $statcache variables show up 0 . . i'm on v3.0.7