[Paul M]

Originally Posted by Rop

Hi Paul,

Thank you for this nice mod!
Could you explain a bit how guests and spiders are counted? As mentioned by others, it seems to greatly undercount spiders. That's probably by design, and it would help if I understood how a guest/spider is counted. From the dB table it looks like it's tracking IP, so I guess unique IPs are only counted once? Even with that in mind the count seems low, so there must be more to it. How is the ID in the table calculated? Possibly multiple instances of a spider result in the same ID?

In the last few posts you mention there's a cron job doing cleanup. What is job called? Or is it part of an existing job, like Daily Cleanup? There doesn't seem to be anything in my list of cron jobs that's related to guest visit tracking. I just want to make sure there is something cleaning up the guests table, so it doesn't grow unbounded.

Thank you!

-Rob-

The unique id is generated by standard vbulletin, iirc it's based on ip and useragent - you will see them in the vb session table if you look.

Basically what this does is create a record for each unigue visitor, as determined by vb, and update that record each time that visitor loads a new page (exactly as happens for a member).

If spider detection is enabled then each time a visitor record is updated it loads vb's spider list (as used on the WOL) and uses this to check if the visitor is a known spider, if it is recognised then the record is updated with the spider name as well as the new lastactive time. (That means if it was off, and you turn it on, you will not see an instant change, visitors will only be updated as they visit).

The count is simply built by loading all the records where the lastactive time is greater than the cutoff (either 24 hours ago, or midnight, depending on the setting).

The cleanup does not use a seperate cron job, it's via a hook in the hourly cleanup job.