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.

[Paul M]

The 24 hours is real time, 24 hours back from when you load the page.

[JKatz]

Love it! Thank you!

[reverse1312]

Hello Paul,

It's a very nice hack !!

Would it be possible to add manually some new spiders IDs ?
I'm in France and we have some spiders that are not among the listed SE spiders...
It would be great to be able to add them manually.

Thank you

[Paul M]

The only way to do that is to edit the spiders file, make sure you keep a copy if you do (for when you upgrade vb).

[reverse1312]

Thanks I'll try that ;-)

Nice job !!!

[reverse1312]

I clicked "installed" ;-)

Edited the spider xml file as you said it's really cool now I can trace more precisely spider real activity :-)

Something I try to understand :

When a visitor is unlogged (cookie erased) he counts as an unlogged guest.
If he logs in. He counts as a logged in visitor and as a guest (he was).
If he erases cookie again, He counts as 1 logged in visitor + 1 guest (same IP)

Correct ?

I wonder how is it possible that Google Bot can be logged and not logged at the same time ?. It has no account on vB... (see attached img)
What doest it mean in that case ?
If it's just the fact that the request of any page has been recorded on the apache access log, I think every visit is logged anyway in that particular sense.
So I'm a bit confused about that...

Thank you

[Paul M]

Logged means the detailed visits logged, only visits to the homepage, forums and threads are logged, anything else is not.

[ArnyVee]

Works great on 3.6.8!

I took a quick glance at the add'l list of spider definitions and noticed that all of them (I went through about 50) were all listed in my xml file. If I were to add the whole list, will the duplicates just work their way out or will I have the same spider showing up twice as a duplicate?

[Paul M]

They should only be counted once.

[voter]

Originally Posted by karel1985

today i had a really major vbulletin database error,

suddenly nothings works anymore and i about one hour i got 200 error messages in my mailbox



the last line 'scipt' is always different, login, forum.php, etc...

for solving the prob i disabled all my producthacks and then enabled one by one
everything is working til the last one was this hack and when i enable it, again vb errors

any suggestion what happened???

Same staff happen to me not once.

REPLACE INTO vbguest
(guestid, hostip, useragent, lastactive, spider, script, rdata)
VALUES
('27afa7c9d161e4eadc7ee2bfda9d874b', '91.103.25.142', 'Opera/9.27
(Windows NT 5.1; U; ru)', 1212415507, '', 'adv_index',
'a:6:{s:1:\"s\";s:0:\"\";s:6:\"postid\";i:0;s:8:\" threadid\";i:0;s:7:\"forumid\";i:0;s:6:\"pollid\"; i:0;s:1:\"a\";s:0:\"\";}');

MySQL Error : Duplicate entry '27afa7c9d161e4eadc7ee2bfda9d874b' for
key 1

I found out that it happen at same time as I was backuping my database. Seems for host server it was to much staff to do all databse replacements read etc staff at once.

Paul could it be that one escpae such errors when Duplicate entry escaped by generating the ids for guest more randomly or just escape the usage of REPLACE. INSERT will be ok and it is in not important to replace the information of already existing guests. Sure one will count them same guest more than once, but at least the error will not come out.