Forum Home Enhancements - Track Guest Visits

This modification is no longer available or supported.

Something that has been repeatedly asked in the "Members who visited today" modifications (all versions) is a similar way to track the number of guests that have visited a forum each day. This isn't possible in stock vbulletin as no record is kept of guest visits, they are a 'realtime' display only. I've therefore finally got round to looking at the issue and produced this modification.

This will add (another) section to the "What's Going On" area. The data is kept in a new table so it should be possible for other uses to be made of it (or display it in other ways). A screenshot of the current display is attached.

Options / Features ;

* The ability to turn it on/off.
* The ability to turn just the display on/off.
* The ability to allow (or prevent) certain usergroups viewing the display.
* The ability to run the display code on all pages (not just forumhome).
* The ability to switch between 'Today' and Rolling 24 Hours display (default).
* The list of guests can be set to be always collapsed on initial view.

* The script that the Guest is running is logged (e.g. showthread, usercp etc).
* The request variables in use are logged (e.g. threadid, userid etc).
* The guest table can be cleaned of old records to help control it's size.
* Controls for the displays automatic template update.
* The datastore read (for spider detection) will read from the File/APC/Memcache/Xcache datastore [if used].

Version 1.19+

* Guest Views data collection - tracking each guests viewing of the forum index page, forums and threads.
* Guest Views data collection can be separately disabled.
* Multiple guest visits to the same page are logged separately.
* Clicking on a Guest type in the main display will list all recent visits by guests of that type.
* Clicking on the option in the guest listing will show that guests viewing data (if enabled).
* Usergroup permissions are now done with the standard vbulleten usergroup permissions system.

Four new usergroup permissions are provided in the usergroup manager.

* Can View the Guests Visited Display - Members can view the guests visited display on Forumhome.
* Can View Guest IP Addresses - Members can see the ip addresses of visiting guests.
* Can View Guest Visits List - Members can view the list of guest visits page.
* Can View Guest Tracking Data - Members can view the individual guest visit tracking page.


Version 1.22+

The option to keep a record of [and display] the most ever guests has been added - this used to be provided by a seperate add-on product.


* All (non usergroup) modification settings are in vBulletin Options > Guest Tracking.

To install ;

• Unzip the XML files.
• Upload the bitfields file to your ../includes/xml folder.
• Import the product into vB using the ACP Product Manager.
• Set your required permissions in the usergroup manager.

Note that by default no permissions are given, you must set them.

You can get an improved Spiders Definition file, that recognises many more spiders, from this post.

Note: For Spider detection to work you must set Enable Spider Display to 'Yes' in vBulletin Options > Who's Online Options.

A German translation has been provided by hurik in post #769 - (for Version 1.22).


History:

v1.00 : Internal dev version.
v1.01 : Initial vb 3.6 beta release.
v1.02 : Phrasing added, final beta version.
v1.03 : Initial full version, some new options added.
v1.04 : Fix potential variable name clash with WVT Mod.
v1.05 : More options added, script and request variable logging added.
v1.06 : Minor internal code changes, phrasing altered slightly.
v1.07 : Datastore call changed to standard fetch function.
v1.08 : Moved Datastore call due to oddities, and fixed small bug.
v1.09 : Simplified always collapsed code.
v1.10 : Datastore call moved and reverted back to db_fetch.
v1.11 : Added Spider Cache Refresh on install (limited release).
v1.12 : Unique Guest id changed from standard vb id to internally created id.
v1.13 : Changed the SQL to force MySQL to use the index on forumhome.
v1.14 : Changed install code to delete old spider cache before rebuilding it.
v1.15 : Added check to try and detect a broken spider cache and fix it.
v1.16 : Number formatting added to individual totals in display list.
v1.17 : New usergroup display options added, datastore read updated.
v1.18 : Beta for new display options - listing guests and tracking guest views.
v1.19 : First release with the new permissions and display options.
v1.20 : Minor changes to install code only.
v1.21 : Internal development version, not released.
v1.22 : Added the "Most ever guests" option.

[TheWhite]

having the same problems, downgraded to version 1.90 toooo :surprised:

[Paul M]

At the risk of repeating myself - unless someone gives me access to a forum displaying the error then nothing is going to get investigated/fixed.

[ShawnV]

Originally Posted by Paul M

At the risk of repeating myself - unless someone gives me access to a forum displaying the error then nothing is going to get investigated/fixed.

I PM'd you info and access.

_V

[Paul M]

Thank you, I'l take a look in a bit.

[Paul M]

I have looked at your forum and you seem to be working ok atm (I have loaded 1.11 for you).

Unfortunately, you are not getting the problem I was looking to try and track down (the "Cannot use string offset as an array" error in global.php).

Can someone who is getting this error please give me access to look into it.

[ShawnV]

Originally Posted by Paul M

I have looked at your forum and you seem to be working ok atm (I have loaded 1.11 for you).

Unfortunately, you are not getting the problem I was looking to try and track down (the "Cannot use string offset as an array" error in global.php).

Can someone who is getting this error please give me access to look into it.

Thank you sir, appreciated.

edit: for some odd reason though, it will show everything, ergo: Visitors (37), Yahoo! Slurp Spiders (3) Google (1)

Then an hour later it will only show Visitors (37) or visitors and yahoo, is there some cron or something else that is clearing out the stored data for those, it is very random?

Cheers,

_V

[Paul M]

There is a cron function to clear out old records, I didn't notice what you had it set to.

[ShawnV]

Originally Posted by Paul M

There is a cron function to clear out old records, I didn't notice what you had it set to.

I have it set to 7 days atm, wonder why its only clearing out the spider info though, not the Visitors?

[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-

[Spiffware]

*updated*