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.

[jw00dy]

Thanks Paul, Nicely done.

[Ricsca]

Thanks!

[red-dna]

I check that set Enable Spider Display is allreadt set to 'Yes' in vBulletin Options
and i also visit the online.php page (and the spiders are displayed ok)
but i get:
Total guests that have visited the forum in the last 24 hours: 609
Visitors (609)

The previous version is worked ok, but with the update i got stuck with this problem.

Any help ?

[MeMySelfNi]

updated..........

[Paul M]

Originally Posted by red-dna

Any help ?

As I have previously mentioned a few times, if you want me to look at a specific problem then unless you provide me with access to your forum (admin access, with the ability to run sql queries) then there is nothing I can do. I cannot investigate problems that are not reproducable on my system.

[storpappa]

Stats are showing visits from the 3 major search engines, but these do not show up in the visitors for the mod. Any suggestions on what to check?

Or a way to send a spoofed bot visit to the site and see what shows up?

As above, I am fine with that. Just PM me if you are interested in looking at the site - thanks

****turned this off, back on, changed a babies popy diaper and now it is working. Your mileage with or without the diaper may vary. Thanks for another great mod Paul

[aciurczak]

As much as I like the functionality of this mod, it had such a performance hit on my board I had to disable it. My board felt sluggish recently, so I paid closer attention to the Microstats at the bottom saying how many seconds & queries it took to create the page. With this plug-in enabled, it would sometimes take 4 or 5 seconds to display my forum home page, (with only 14 queries). It was never less than 3 seconds.

After disabling this hack, it is back down to between 0.4 and 1.0 seconds to create the home page, with 13 queries. This hack reported that I was getting about 2000 guests visiting per day (vast majority were spiders), and my server load never reports over 0.8, so it likely wasn't a server load problem.

Any suggestions on indexing certain tables to improve performance?

[Paul M]

Hmm, looking at this on my homepage, mysql is not using the index for some reason, even though it exists. By forcing it the query is quicker.

Change the SQL call (in Plugin 3) to this and let me know what happens ;

PHP Code:

    $todaysguests = $vbulletin->db->query_read_slave("
        SELECT * FROM ".TABLE_PREFIX."guest FORCE INDEX (lastactive) WHERE lastactive > $cutoff
    "); 


[aciurczak]

That did it. Page load time is back under a second, with the mod enabled. Thx for the quick fix.

[Paul M]

Originally Posted by aciurczak

That did it. Page load time is back under a second, with the mod enabled. Thx for the quick fix.

Good, I'll release that as an update tomorrow.

Investigating that has highlighted some index issues in a few other mods as well, so I've a few updates to issue ......