[mfyvie]

Keyness, the only way for you to verify this is to look into the session table. There you will see the guests and how they are classified (by checking the spider column). -1 means a real guest, 0 means not decided, and 1 means a spider.

I have many guests who arrive on my forum by google, but in reality they don't do anything and they don't move around the site. In this case their status may stay on "0" and they won't get shown in the totals. For example, I have a lot of hits where google has brought someone directly to an attachment or an image has been sideloaded because an image in one of my threads has been directly linked in another forum's thread. This type of thing creates sessions in your table, but these users show no activity on your forum in reality.

I don't think any other mods are affecting it, because those totals are nothing more than the number of rows returned from the mysql query that checks the spider status of each connection.

For example, on my session table right now I have 89 guests with spider status -1 (real guest), 4 with status 0 (unknown) and 81 with status 1 (spider). Of course different forums will vary in how many real guests they have versus spiders.

Just bear in mind that a visitor coming in via google could have come in for any reason - it could even be that they found an image via google images and that image was displayed on the google images page - this will appear like a visit, but it isn't really.

If you want to be really sure you could do something like a grep on your web server logs for each IP address you want to test. I did this when I was testing the mod, because like you, I thought it might not be working. During this process I actually discovered how many other forums were sideloading my attachments and I reconfigured my web server to block them!