GlobalStats: Online Users, Today's Posts, etc. on Any Page

GlobalStats v1.0
6/26/05 :: futureal

What It Does
GlobalStats allows you to add some of the forum statistics to any page in your forums. The stats include:

- total posts
- total threads
- total users
- users currently online
- registered/guests currently online
- newest member

It also adds a new statistic:

- today's posts

Basically, you can display the same information from the "What's Going On" section of the forum index on any page.

How Does it Impact Performance?
The hack adds a single query to your forum index page and a single query whenever a post is made. However, both are INSERT queries; no additional lookup queries are required. I have tested this on my live forum with over 1.6 million posts and hundreds of active users and it didn't hurt performance.

Installation
There are four files to edit:
/index.php
/global.php
/includes/functions_newpost.php
/includes/init.php

For instructions, see the file.

Screenshots
Here it is in action on one of my forums, with all the stats in a header that shows up on every page.

On the index page: http://www.rctech.net/forum/index.php
On a child page: http://www.rctech.net/forum/forumdisplay.php?f=2

More Info
If there is a better way to make this hack, please share it. I dug around a bit and couldn't find anything. However, it's always possible that there was already a checkbox somewhere in the Admin panel that did this for us.

The "Today's Posts" counter needs to be incremented rather than queried because on sites with a large post table (such as mine) it becomes very expensive. With this implementation, we are only using INSERT queries (actually REPLACE INTO queries) via build_datastore().

If you have any feedback or problems, please let me know. Tested on a virgin 3.0.7 as well as my ever-so-slightly modified forum.

[nwelsh]

got it to work, nm . . didn't follow instructions to dot.

[browsehosts]

is there a way for this to count how many people are online including on the "non-vb" pages?