Guest stat question

[jamesf4218]

How can I make guests who have been banned not show up in the guests online total?

Thanks

[snakes1100]

Guests online total, i assume this is the guests that has visited today hack total you are asking about.

Please post in the thread that you downloaded the hack/addon from and ask there.

[jamesf4218]

Originally Posted by snakes1100

Guests online total, i assume this is the guests that has visited today hack total you are asking about.

Please post in the thread that you downloaded the hack/addon from and ask there.

No, I haven't installed any hack. On the forum home page it says something like:

Currently Active Users: 59 (8 members and 51 guests)

If 5 of those guests have been banned, I don't want them to be included in the guest total so it would say:

Currently Active Users: 59 (8 members and 46 guests)

How is this done?

Thanks

[Opserty]

How do you know they are banned anyway? There isn't a way to differentiate between a legitimate guest and a banned user until they login in. You could just add them to the Banned IP list in the "vBulletin Options" of your AdminCP, if you are really concerned, whether this will affect the total I don't know.

Anyway why do you want to reduce the number of visitors? It would make more sense to leave it as it, I doubt many of your members will be that concerned that the number is 5 to high, let alone if they notice it or even read it!

[jamesf4218]

Originally Posted by Opserty

How do you know they are banned anyway? There isn't a way to differentiate between a legitimate guest and a banned user until they login in.

This is not true. If you ban someone by IP they will get an error message the moment they try and view a page.

Originally Posted by Opserty

You could just add them to the Banned IP list in the "vBulletin Options" of your AdminCP, if you are really concerned, whether this will affect the total I don't know.

This has been done but they still show up in the guest list total.

Originally Posted by Opserty

Anyway why do you want to reduce the number of visitors? It would make more sense to leave it as it, I doubt many of your members will be that concerned that the number is 5 to high, let alone if they notice it or even read it!

They didn't just notice it, they were the ones that brought it up. I just used 5 as an example to illustrate the problem. We actually have a rogue crawler that keeps visiting our site, 50 bots at a time, thus adding 50 non guests to the online guest total which looks stupid.

There must be a way to amend the code to discount users who have been banned, from counting towards the online guest total?

[snakes1100]

If this is a dedicated server, use iptables and ban them from the server period.

If its not, use a htaccess file and host deny the ip.

[Opserty]

Banning them from the server/site is your only real option as, as soon as they visit your site their data (IP e.t.c.) is stored automatically in the session table, which is where the guest count comes from. Checking all the guests in this table against the IP Ban List may cause a performance hit especially as your forum grows, if they are permanently banned from the forums I would just suggest snakes1100 method.

I'm not trying to skirt round the issue but the gains from going to the trouble of editing files and extra work done by the server don't seem worth it. If you really want to then you could try editing the query in the index.php file. (You'll need to search for it but I'm sure its commented somewhere). If there is a common IP then you could just count users that do not have that IP I guess.

[jamesf4218]

OK thanks