How accurate are the people online stats?

Client Joined: Sep 18, 2004 Posts: 62

Hi all, I was wondering how accurate the people online stats are that are displayed on the front page of many of our sites?

For instance, right now the people online count for my site is the following:

People Online:
Visitors: 123
Members: 2
Total: 125

It seems as though somewhere around that many people are online 24 hours a day - sometimes it dips down to 90 or so - but if so, it seems like I would be getting tons more page views than I am.

Posted: Mon Oct 17, 2005 7:49 am

I wouldnt put much faith in their 'complete' accuracy or with the 'Most users online' stats.
I have seen over 200 online at any time on my own site, whilst the other gives me 'The most Users online 114'.

If you take these statistics as a 'guide' then they are of some use.

Dont forget that these statisctics will include bots, search engines and any sites hotlinking to yours. It might be a good idea to compare them against your server logs or for a 'general' comparison one of the add-on modules like IP Tracking.

Posted: Mon Oct 17, 2005 8:20 am

Thanks...stats are always an interesting thing to study. You can look at hits in nukestats vs. webtrends vs. the others and come up with a dozen different numbers - sometimes varying by thousands of pageviews!

Posted: Tue Oct 18, 2005 1:11 am

They are not very accurate. Especially since they don't really filter out spiders. One day I had 300 visitors.. I added IP checking to remove spiders from Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc. and that dropped down to around 150 visitors.

Posted: Wed Oct 26, 2005 10:49 pm

Also the default 'who's online' function checks for the last 60 minutes (3600) of activity, so that can keep it higher than true. I've take it down to 5 minutes (300) on my sites for a more accurate refelection of who actually on the site and no been gone for an hour.

You can find this setting in your mainfile.php online() function.