who's online ?

stan livedeath

is it possible for the site to display which members are currently logged in at any time ?

Simon

It is but I'm not sure what benefit it provides - there are normally between 50 and 100 active sessions, what would showing or not showing particular names tell us?

I always want to balance scalability and performance with benefit. Everything that you add has both a performance and a complexity cost, not just for the server / hosting side but also clients viewing it. So I want to be sure there is a clear benefit.

It's one of those things that lots of forum software has (because they all copied from each other) but if you site and ask "why" I'm not sure there is a good reason for having it.

If there was a live-chat then it would make more sense but the whole point of a forum is normally that it provides asynchronous communication where people don't actually have to be online at the same time in order to have a discussion.

stan livedeath

There are normally between 50 and 100 active sessions

-that is interesting---i had no idea it was that many---in a way that answers your question Simon--what would showing or not showing particular names tell us?

Simon

If it's how many visitors there are then it's a slightly different question. I've been looking at the Google Analytics API as a may of showing better visit information which is going to be more accurate than a simplistic hit-counter on a page. It looks like it *should* be possible to show viewers of a topic over time as well.

It's low priority / on the back-burner for now, just something I explore when I have a free moment and want a break from what I'm supposed to be working on.

I always have to weight up privacy issues as well. People may find showing their status as online intrusive but if people can opt-out it then becomes rather useless.

Giordano

There are people I enjoy reading. But I am topic driven and since that is well covered I don't need to know who is logged in or not.

Simon

There are people I enjoy reading.

It won't be as high-priority as "watch topics" but maybe "watch for topics (or posts?) by ..." might be useful?

cappytan

Are you talking about using Analytics to publicly display data, or just using it for analyzing visitor data for your own benefit?

Because, if it's the latter, it's a very simple matter to implement.

Simon

I already have analytics setup for my own use, I meant making some available to show more informative data about views than a simplistic and incredibly inaccurate hit counter would measure.

Google analytics won't count bots, scrapers etc ... and can show views over time (again, something more useful than a single number).

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