[tamarian]

Originally Posted by Spinball

tamarian, the situation which leads to the scenario I am taking about here is a link to a specific thread on your site from another site. (or sometimes if you're lucky, more than one site) when something particularly interesting has caught their attention.
Their referer information*should* in the first instance hold the site containing the link to yours.
Perhaps the referer information could only be stored if it's off site.
Although having all the referer information would allow us to show the route people take though the site. Something which may be useful in analysing how well presented and usable your site is.

The session table won't be helpful in analysing the viewing patterns, or route through the site, because it replaces the activity, rather than add a new record.

There's an easier option, if you want to know when a specific site is sending referrals to you. You can add a short peice of code in showthread.php, that "if the referral is site xyz.com, then email this address that they've come". This would have the advanatage the information is not lost, and gives you an email alert. It also has the advanatage of no database access, and no added processing, unless the referral you're interested in has dropped by.

However, I don't think any of this fucntionality is worth slowing down the forums significantly.

Exactly. The session table is heavily used, and any additional fields and processing in the session file will be executed on every single vBulletin function.

I can't actually analyse our apache logs as they are too big.

You might want to consider adding Urchin to your server. It's very effecient in crunching the logs and making useful reports out of it. Most hosting companies can install it for a one time license fee of $20 or so.

[Edit:] My moderators have asked if the thread title rather than the thread number could be shown. I agree that this would be most useful.

That would be easy to add.