[BadgerDog]

After expanding the capability of Ted's excellent mod into support our vbCMS extension, we've started to look at ways to ensure people just don't clear cookies and start over using our site research resources without registering.

So, here's what we'd like feedback on ...

Ted offers a method to log users as an option in his mod, but before we turn it ON, we wanted to query ...

Enable Database Logging ON/OFF

This option allows you to turn database logging on or off. When turned on guest views will be stored in a mysql table. This is more effective than using cookies alone for tracking but adds queries to every thread view causing additional server load and may have spider implications. See the support thread for more detail.

Combined with storing the IP log forever (if you wanted), this seems to be an obvious method of getting people who clear cookies (or have that browser option OFF) be forced to register to continue to view our site all, unless of course they change IP addresses.

We get about 600 members logging in every 24 hours with about 3,000 guests (supposedly no bots as per Paul M's mod). Is there anyone here with a medium sized site who uses this option and if so, what kind of performance hit do you get using it? Also, did you find it affected "spiders" in a negative way?

Thanks for any feedback ..

Regards,
Doug