Most On At Once

[TestingSomething]

That total either needs to be reworked or dropped. It is useless right now becuase any bots not recognized by the list will count as 100+ people sometimes. It either should check IP addresses and not use duplicates as separate visitors or it shouldn't count guests at all. There have never been more than probably 20 people on my site at once because I have never found a way to get it very active, yet the total of most online is 616 because of spiders and/or a DOS attack!

[bfarber]

It does check IP (sessions check IPs for guests and update if the IP already exists).

That doesn't stop Yahoo, for example, sending 1000 spiders to your site at once from different IPs, however. When that happens you DO actually have the number of pcs connecting to your site that the number says. I fail to see how it's inaccurate.

[TestingSomething]

I just personally think guests shouldn't be counted in it then. I don't know, either way it's not going to be accurate all the time. I would say it's accurate most of the time, but most likely that one day when mine was abnormally large an attack of some sort was probably causing it. It just takes one day of something weird to cause that total to be inaccurate. I hate to reset it too. I guess I could always change it to what I think it should be, but frankly I have no clue. lol

[bfarber]

Why does it matter so much? :blink: I mean, it shows how many computers connected to your site - so it is accurate as to how many "users" (real and artificial) were online.

[Mark]

It is misleading...

We have x registered members
The newest member is x
Most users ever online was x on x

It definately sounds like it means registered members. "We have... the newest is... most ever..." when in fact the last piece of data is talking about something different.




Although yeah, it doesn't *really* matter, and that is how most softwares do it

[rheaton]

The report SAYS it's talking about something different.

As you pointed out, it says....

We have x registered members
The newest member is x
Most users ever online was x on x

Not most members. users. It's clearly stating the most ever value uses a different metric.

Heck, 90% of the time I ignore it anyway, so I don't see the issue. Why does it matter? We have over 2000 registered members and our most ever online is something like 150. I don't think one has any bearing on the other, or that most people would construe one to imply the other. I know for a fact my site has a ton of 'trolls' because we have a large body of information in one of our forums about a popular MMO. So a vast majority of the time most of the people looking at my forums are guests not members.

[TestingSomething]

yeah yeah, it's still misleading though. I would guess on most sites it's close to accurate, but sites that are being dead like mine.... it becomes obvious something is up. lol I should just reset it to what I think it should be becuase it really was a one day freak occurrence.... my other site is even MORE dead, but it doesn't have an outrageous number compared to members. It was just this one particular day and I definitely think someone did an attack that day rather than it being bots.

[_Diesel_]

I caught one of these turkeys in the act a couple of weeks ago. I looked on "Last Click" and saw hundreds of the same IP as they were being generated. It drove my "Most users ever online" up to 1100 or so before I could ban the IP. It's just a short term solution until the next one comes along. <_< "Most members ever online" continues to be accurate.

Edited to add: Maybe we could get Brandon to auto-ban any IP that shows up 5 or 10 times in the same minute? :P

[Quick]

I caught one of these turkeys in the act a couple of weeks ago. I looked on "Last Click" and saw hundreds of the same IP as they were being generated. It drove my "Most users ever online" up to 1100 or so before I could ban the IP. It's just a short term solution until the next one comes along. <_< "Most members ever online" continues to be accurate.

Edited to add: Maybe we could get Brandon to auto-ban any IP that shows up 5 or 10 times in the same minute? :P

I too have experienced that bug. In May last year 1,000 users from the same IP (Somewhere in Russia) bombarded my site for around half an hour. Server load/CPU was steady.

[TestingSomething]

The problem though is sometimes search engine spiders have the same IP for more than 1 topic at the same minute. I usually figure if the site slows down a lot it's an attack, wheras if it seems to be as fast as usual, it's most likely a bot.

[TestingSomething]

Sigh. Seriously doubt this is a coincidence that while I am talking back and forth in this topic, there are now 100+ "guests" on my site with the same exact IP in different topics at the same exact second. I guess it's possible it's a bot, but it's been a while since it tossed out that many guests and it's right when this topic has been active lately.

[Morrigan]

I've had this happen twice today and I find it aggravating, I don't think that I SHOULD see a duplicate IP address in the Who's online list, it should remove it if another of the same IP shows up (an auto delete if IP=same in the table) I resolved the IP and one is a bot and the other was some mail program in Australia and these weren't looking at different topics on my forum they were all looking at the Board Index and it showed 17 of them. I banned them temporarily so that they wouldn't continue to spam my site with it's invalid requests.

I verified that it didn't match any of my current users that were online at. My site is medial, it's 37 strong right now and of those users 5 of them are me or my modification bots so I shouldn't be seeing Most users online higher then the amount of people on my site really it's just not logical.

[Morrigan]

Is this a problem that shows up by not showing spiders? Because it seems that everyone thinks it is spiders but even if you choose to show spiders won't it count it the same way?

I've been doing a whois on all of these bots/whatever it is that is doing this to my site and they aren't necessarily bots, I've found one bot, one server, one mail thing, these are just SPAMMING my online logs! It's ridiculous! Spider or not it shouldn't show more then one guest from one IP.

[Morrigan]

I think this is the code that has to be changed in someway to subtract the guests from the session count but I can't seem to get it to work.

 function session_get_count( $a )

{

$to_return = "";


$to_return = "SELECT COUNT(*) as total_sessions

FROM ".SQL_PREFIX."sessions s

WHERE s.running_time > {$a['time']} {$a['db_mem']}";



if( $a['remove_anon'] )

{

$to_return .= " AND s.login_type <> 1";

}


if( $a['remove_spiders'] )

{

$to_return .= " AND RIGHT(s.id, 8) != '_session'";

}



return $to_return;

}


function session_get_sessions( $a )

{

$to_return = "";


$to_return = "SELECT *

FROM ".SQL_PREFIX."sessions s

WHERE s.running_time > {$a['time']} {$a['db_mem']}";


if( $a['remove_anon'] )

{

$to_return .= " AND s.login_type <> 1";

}


if( $a['remove_spiders'] )

{

$to_return .= " AND RIGHT(s.id, 8) != '_session'";

}


$to_return .= " ORDER BY {$a['db_key']} {$a['db_order']} LIMIT {$a['start']}, {$a['finish']}";


return $to_return;

}