Anyone notice? New benchmark record set!

1080 users online on June 1st! Go OZZU!!!!

900bots probaby or.. atleast half are.. :\

Go Ozzu Members! But all those Guests!! Why don't you just sign up or sign in if you're interested!!!

they are all bots, but don't let the mods know that you know

the few that aren't bots are probably people who found an ozzu page in a search engine and visited just to get one answer and didn't come back.

Yeah, most forum always seem to have a disproportioately high guest count - I always thought it might be bots.

Then again, it does mean the site is doing well if that many bots are finding us

What bots do we think they most likely are. Search engines? Email harvesters? I'm just curious what would account for quite so many hits?

I'm not sure but it could be because of the way some search engines stuff up when handling seesion IDs, and therefore whenever they "click" on a link, a new guest is registered as browsing without destroying the old one. The old one doesn't get destroyed until five minutes have passed, so as the SE moves through the site it progressively registers more and more guests

When a search engine visits ozzu they will not receive a session ID from us. We have programmed our forum software to be SE friendly. As far as for the amount of guests online many could be bots. We are planning to implement something soon so that the guest count does not reflect any of the bots. That way it will be more accurate. However the fact the total is over 1000 is a good sign. We did set a record number of visitors yesterday on ozzu

bigweb how do you make sure bots don't get session IDs?

woot!

The main way which catches all the bots is that I made an edit to the sessions.php file so that every user who is not logged in does not get session IDs.



As far as I know search engine bots do not login - This effectively makes it so that session IDs will not cause any problems as far as links on the pages are concerned (where the exact same pages with different session IDs are perceived to be different to the bots).

There are other things you could do as well to simply target a few bots. I like my way though because it gets the majority of them.

*Added note - After re-reading what you said about session IDs, what I have done is simply made it so that Google doesn't pass session IDs through the links (which PHPBB does if it cannot store it in a cookie). Really though I guess internally the session IDs are created which is what shows up as a "guest" on ozzu. However the bots that are visiting have no clue this is going on and normally these session IDs would be tagged to the end of all the links. This could make the bots go in infinte loops because of the new session IDs making the pages look like its hasn't been visited yet.

thanks heaps bigweb, I have been looking for a way to do that for ages.

hmmm I wonder how the site handled with all those members on

1100 now! woohoo

wow.