Hi,

I would like to understand why the hidden query "guest=x" disappear when we go to the login page. If a visitor go to this page and after go to another page (without log in), he will be counted as two visitors in the "Who's online" page.

Thank you.

François

Hi François,

Our thinking was that if a user goes to the login page, they are going to log in and hence we can stop keeping track of the guest ID. However, as you point out, this is a bug when the user goes to the page and then goes to another page without logging in. We'll get this fixed up.

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Jason Rhinelander
Gossamer Threads
jason@gossamer-threads.com

Hi,

I think Gforum should and could have a better system to track visitors. The hidden query "guest" system is not really efficient. For exemple, when a user put on his message the url of the short cut of another post, the hidden query is not take in consideration and all visitors that will click on this url will be counted at least as two visitors each.

As an administrator of my forum, I can easily see with the IP that most of the time the same visitor appears at least as two or three visitors in the Who's online page.

I think a better system would use first a cookie to track visitors. If the cookie is not accepted by the browser (that happens less than 5% of the time) it should use and check at the same time the hidden variable "guest=x" and the IP of the visitor. The system should not allow that the same IP gets two different "guest" number (hidden query) at the same time - it should be counted as one visitor. I think this way the system to track visitors will be a lot more efficient.

Thank you.

François

Sorry for my bad english.

Hi François,

Regarding IP tracking, there are several reasons why we do not want to do that - primarily, many internet users use shared IP's. For example, here at our office everyone connects out through a firewall, and thus we have the same IP on all outgoing connections (office.gossamer-threads.com), although each person is using seperate computers.

What I will try to do for GForum 2.x is be a little more careful with it - I think setting a guest cookie may help, however I may also have to look at a fix for, e.g., the search engine templates, since they don't pass around a guest ID.

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Jason Rhinelander
Gossamer Threads
jason@gossamer-threads.com