Count visitors on my website

[Ciaran]

Hi I've seen this a few places - The site lists off the number of
people (not logged in) currently browsing the site. How can I do this
with php / mySQL please?

[Michael Fesser]

..oO(noidtluom)

>Well, I was simply trying to give a practical solution that can be
used. I myself have never done this sort of thing, but off the top of
my head that is what I'll do. Anyway, I'm certain people have made
script about this sort of thing. Just google one up and see how they
did it. Or you can look into scripts such as PHPBB or IPB.

Why should I? I know that such scripts exist, but I also know that they
can never be accurate. Period.

It's like all these amateurish scripts that try to prevent website users
from clicking the right mouse button - there are tons of them available,
but not a single one will ever work, simply because it's impossible (not
to mention the usability problems in this particular case).

EOD for me
Micha

[Aerik]

At the risk of exposing myself to this flamefest:

Let's redefine the problem a bit: If one wanted to broadcast some
number that has some tenuous tie to reality, and the purpose of that
number was to to be a cool marketing thing that give some fuzzy
indicator of the popularity of a website, one could code a solution.
I would go about it like this: send a cookie and log pageloads
associated with that cookie. Calculate some number based on the
number of browsers (cookies) that have loaded pages in the last x
time. If you wanted to make it a little more tightly tied to reality,
you could even look at the the distributions of visit per cookie over
time, so see how many page loads are generally associated with a
cookie for a short period of time, and refine your x time
accordingly. Is this the same as "currently online"? No. Do some
people think a number a like this is nifty? Yes. If one required
users to be logged in (say, in a bulletin board system) one could very
easily and truthfully broadcast a number that says "currently logged
in users". Also, just a nifty little number and some people think is
cool.
Best Regards,
Aerik

[Krustov]

<comp.lang.ph p>
<Michael Fesser>
<Mon, 16 Jul 2007 05:35:39 +0200>
<nf************ *************** *****@4ax.com>

Using the IP to "identify" a user is even more unreliable than anything
else

Not everybody is looking 100% accuracy .

$klock being set a value in the config file .
<?php

$rambo=$_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR']; $rambo=str_repl ace(".","_",$ra mbo);

$demo=$_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGEN T']; $wsx=strtolower ($demo); $witt="zz";

$qaz=strpos($ws x,"windows"); if ($qaz==true) {$witt="ie";}
$qaz=strpos($ws x,"firefox"); if ($qaz==true) {$witt="ff";}
$qaz=strpos($ws x,"safari"); if ($qaz==true) {$witt="sf";}
$qaz=strpos($ws x,"opera"); if ($qaz==true) {$witt="op";}
$qaz=strpos($ws x,"mac"); if ($qaz==true) {$witt="mc";}

$wsx=$rambo . "_" . $witt; $rambo=$wsx;

$wsx=time()+$kl ock;

$filenamecu="de mo/$rambo.php"; $fpcu=fopen($fi lenamecu,"w");
fwrite ($fpcu,$rambo); fwrite ($fpcu,"\n");
fwrite ($fpcu,$wsx); fwrite ($fpcu,"\n");
fclose ($fpcu);

?>