Forum Home Enhancements - Site Life Status for vB 4

Site Life Status for vB 4
Version 1.0.4
(By Boofo)

What does this product do?
This product will add a Site Life Status info area, including Site Startup Date, Site Age, Site Location, Pagehits counter and Average visits, to your forumhome What's Going On box.

NOTE: The maximum counter value will depend on your system. The maximum signed integer value for 32 bit systems is 2147483647 (or 2,147,483,647), while the maximum signed integer value for 64 bit systems is 9223372036854775807 (or 9,223,372,036,854,775,807). These are the highest numbers this counter will be able to count to, depending on your system.

Version Information:
Version 1.0.0 --Initial release for vB 4
Version 1.0.1 --Added Site Life Status Date Display Format option to settings.
Version 1.0.2 --Added Site Life Status Locale option to settings. This will allow you to display the Site Life Status Date Display Format day and month name in your local language.
Version 1.0.3 --Fixed for WGO style changes in vB 4.0.8. (Site_Life_Status_vb4.08.zip only)
Version 1.0.4 --Reverted back to the original js file because of the timer messing up with the added leap year code.

Credits:
A thank you goes out to Shawn Dean for supplying the original javascript code for the Site Age counter.

Installation overview:
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1 Product XML (5 Plugins, 36 Phrases, 1 template, 7 settings and 1 file)

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Installation Instructions:
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1. Upload site_life_status.js to the forums/clientscript folder on your site.

NOTE: You will need to delete the old site_life.js file as the new one has been renamed.

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2. Go to your Admin CP
Scroll down to 'Plugin System'
Click 'Manage Products'
Click 'Add/Import Product'
Click the 'Browse' button, and locate the product-boofo_site_lifestatus.xml file on your computer

3. Go to your Admin CP -> vBulletin Options -> Site Life Status and set the following options:
--Site Life Status Enable: Enable/Disable the Site Life Status.
--Site Life Status Startup Date: Enter your site startup date.
--Site Life Status Location: Type your site location in here. If you do not wish for your location to be shown, leave this option blank.
--Update the page views counter to the value below? If you want to change the current page views counter value on forumhome to the value provided below, set this to "Yes" - it will automatically be reset to "No" once the new value has been set (at the next page view).
--Site Life Status Forumhome Page Views Counter: Enter the number of page views, without commas, to start the page views count at. (Example: 16897)
--Site Life Status Locale: Set your system locale here. This will allow the Site Life Status Date Display Format below to display the month and day names in your local language.
--Site Life Status Date Display Format: Enter the date and time format you want the Site Startup Date to display on the forumhome.
-------------------------------

Done!
Enjoy!

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[Boofo]

All it does is read the counter from the datastore in the vb db. Make sure the datastore has the counter on the server that doesn't show it.

[Alan_SP]

I just found out that turning off xcache, i.e. not using xcache for datastore solved problem.

Any idea how to set this up to work with xcache and it's datastore?

EDIT: further info: I removed datastore prefix and it works ok now. I think you should try to include datastore prefix somehow.

This is the line in config.php I commented out:

// $config['Datastore']['prefix'] = 'forum_';

With this enabled, it doesn't work. It's not too big a problem for me, but there could be people who would use Xcache for more than vBulletin. So it works with xCache, but not when datastore prefix is used.

[Alan_SP]

And as a feature request, is it possible to program this mod to work with real usage statistics? What I mean is, I just supposed I had 8 millions hits so far, but it's not precise. Can you make it to use two counters, one from the installation, that counts actual page hits and one that's just sum of actual and the supposed page hits till now?

This way we would have better site statistics.

Also, if you go that way, if there could be way to reset page hits and while reseting them, giving this offset counter value of total hits till reset, so we could benchmark actual site usage in various periods, but retaining total page hits.

Or using altogether two counters, one real, from installation and one with installation plus offset?

[Boofo]

Originally Posted by Alan_SP

I just found out that turning off xcache, i.e. not using xcache for datastore solved problem.

Any idea how to set this up to work with xcache and it's datastore?

EDIT: further info: I removed datastore prefix and it works ok now. I think you should try to include datastore prefix somehow.

This is the line in config.php I commented out:

// $config['Datastore']['prefix'] = 'forum_';

With this enabled, it doesn't work. It's not too big a problem for me, but there could be people who would use Xcache for more than vBulletin. So it works with xCache, but not when datastore prefix is used.

I used to have xcache enabled on my server and this worked just fine with it. I didn't use a prefix for the datacache, and to be honest, you are the only one who has ever reported that. So I don't really see a need for the prefix.

[Boofo]

Originally Posted by Alan_SP

And as a feature request, is it possible to program this mod to work with real usage statistics? What I mean is, I just supposed I had 8 millions hits so far, but it's not precise. Can you make it to use two counters, one from the installation, that counts actual page hits and one that's just sum of actual and the supposed page hits till now?

This way we would have better site statistics.

Also, if you go that way, if there could be way to reset page hits and while reseting them, giving this offset counter value of total hits till reset, so we could benchmark actual site usage in various periods, but retaining total page hits.

Or using altogether two counters, one real, from installation and one with installation plus offset?

That is more than I want to invest in a free mod, since I would not use it.

[Alan_SP]

Originally Posted by Boofo

I used to have xcache enabled on my server and this worked just fine with it. I didn't use a prefix for the datacache, and to be honest, you are the only one who has ever reported that. So I don't really see a need for the prefix.

I just realized, I needed to disable xcache for datastore. If xcache was enabled, counter remained static, not updating at all. I'm modifying gc interval, maybe it would solve this problem.

What are your var.ttl, var.maxttl i gc_interval settings?

EDIT: No luck, xcache datastore needs to be disabled for your mod to work, at least page hits part. Is it possible to put somehow counter outside of xcache datastore?

[Boofo]

Thew counter does NOT remain static. It updates the counter in the datastore on every page refresh. The xcache will update the counter when it updates the cache. I don't use any server caching anymore. I don't have enough users to warrant using it right now.

[Alan_SP]

Well, for some reason it doesn't work for me when I cache datastore in xcache. Only without caching counter gets updated.

At the moment I don't need to cache datastore, so I can use it, but later I hope that I'll need caching.

[Boofo]

Originally Posted by Alan_SP

Well, for some reason it doesn't work for me when I cache datastore in xcache. Only without caching counter gets updated.

At the moment I don't need to cache datastore, so I can use it, but later I hope that I'll need caching.

It DOES work when you have xcache enabled. It just doesn't update the counter on the forumhome until the cache gets updated. The counter is being updated on every page refresh in the datastore, and if you will check the datastore, you will see that. None of your counters will update any more than this one will when you are using a server cache. You're not understanding how caching works.

[Garamond]

vB4? It just sucks. Most serious admins are still using 3.8.x

When is a version ready for that?