Forum Home Enhancements - Track Guest Visits

This modification is no longer available or supported.

This tracks 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. This will add (another) section to the "What's Going On" area.

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].
* 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 done with the standard vbulleten usergroup permissions system.
* The option to keep a record of [and display] the most ever guests can be enabled.

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.

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

To install (or upgrade);

• Unzip the XML files.
• Upload the bitfields file to your ../includes/xml folder.
• If upgrading from the vb 3.6 version, delete the bitfield_track-guests.xml file from your ../includes/xml folder.
• Import the product into vBulletin using the ACP Product Manager.
• Set your required permissions in the usergroup manager.

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


You can get an improved Spiders Definition file from this post - and now a more recent version is available from this site.

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


History:

v3.7.001 : Initial vb 3.7 release.
v3.7.002 : Fix for cron_script hook changed in 3.7 Beta 4.
v3.7.003 : Header, Navbar and Footer added to guest display pages.
v3.7.004 : Tracking of visits to archive pages added.

[munnakv]

Thanks Paul. Installed.

[GlamRockTalk]

This mod ROCKS!

Thanks Paul

[Barteh]

Nice, installed

Is it possible for identified spiders from vbulletin_spiders.xml to be logged separately?
Or, to rephrase that, I don't care that google and yahoo periodically check every public page there is, and not logging them would keep the database size low even with a longer history period.

And a bit of a feature request: one of the first 'visitors' turned out to be a forum user who was simply logged out... would it be possible in a future version, to include an IP query (like the native one in the adminCP) showing matching registered forum users in a column?

[jerx]

I have one question regarding the guest count. Although guests cannot do very much on our site (can only read forum), we have 3 times the amount of guests than the amount of registered users. When does the guest count increase?

1. user visits as guest, logs in and leaves the site. Counted or not?
2. user visits as guest, logs in, logs out and leaves the site. Counted or not? If yes, how many times?
3. user visits as registered user, logs out and leaves the site. Counted or not?

[Paul M]

1. Yes.
2. Yes, they only count as one visitor.
3. I dont believe so, but not 100% sure.

[jerx]

Originally Posted by Paul M

1. Yes.
2. Yes, they only count as one visitor.
3. I dont believe so, but not 100% sure.

1 and 2 is what I have expected, but I thought that the count would be increased in situation 3, too.

Wouldn' t it be better to substract the number of registered user, who have visited the forum (if your other mod is also installed of course)? Ok, this would give you false numbers for those who visit as registered member without ever logging out. Maybe only substract half of the amount.

[Paul M]

Nope, it would not be better to subtract anything.

If someone visits a page, not logged in, then they are a visitor, simple as that. I see no reason to start complicating matters and start fudging things.

JFYI, in my experience, few members ever actually log out once they have logged in, so they never visit the site as a guest.

[Barteh]

Some people have very restrictive cookie settings (keep until the browser closes) or regularly wipe them manually, but you're probably right in that this is a small percentage.

Any chance you could separate recognised spiders from other IPs where the log cut-off date is concerned? The reason I've started using your mod is for antispam purposes, to see if any unrecognised crawlers are poking around our forums and I bet yahoo's slurp spider alone will end up producing half the log size. Would help if you could only save the last 24 hours of known spider IPs (for the display) and log everything elsefor a longer period.

[Paul M]

Sorry, but I dont plan any changes to this other than I may one day collect the referer (and that would be in the 3.8 or 4.0 version).

[LG Alex]

Screenshots? please