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Public area => The Pub => Features => Topic started by: Arantor on June 19th, 2013, 05:50 AM

Title: More useless nonsense
Post by: Arantor on June 19th, 2013, 05:50 AM
So, long story short, as part of what I'm doing out here in the US, I'm building a website for it and it's an SMF install[1] with a ported WP theme[2]

And so while I'm gutting SMF's shonky old markup (and dear god it is, I forgot how far we came with it), I got to thinking. Yes, really, all this build up for a small point.[3]

On the board index we have:
Most Online Today: 25. Most Online Ever: 98 (July 7th, 2012, 08:52 AM)

or similar. I want it gone. I see no reason to keep the maximum number of people online today (which is guests + members + bots), nor do I see a need to keep the most online ever stat. They only serve as a 'we were this busy at > this < time'. Which if the record was set some time ago, could be a problem.[4]

I just see no reason to keep it. It's logic we don't need, queries we can save on the board index, etc.
 1. Needs stability, I won't be able to babysit it all the time, nor will the people taking it on after I'm done be as technically minded as I am so maintenance needs to be easy.
 2. Porting a WP theme was easier when I stopped trying to look at the PHP. There's no licence issue here because I'm not distributing the result. GPLv2 is awesome in that respect.
 3. It's a bit of a liberty for my 14kth post but what are you going to do about it? In response to the comment about displaying it as 14k, I have no problem with that. When you're < 1000 posts, each post matters. When you get to the thousands, nothing nearer than the hundreds mark even matters. 13.9k to 14k matters. 13k to 13.1k is an indication of progress, in a way that 13099 to 13100 isn't. I'd be quite happy to see post counts formatted that way in main display.
 4. Especially if your figures happen to be: Most Online Today: 1,555. Most Online Ever: 3,726 (January 18, 2008, 10:00:17 PM)
Title: Re: More useless nonsense
Post by: spoogs on June 19th, 2013, 06:58 AM
Gotta say I agree there
Title: Re: More useless nonsense
Post by: Auk on June 19th, 2013, 07:29 AM
Could make it optional then, or move it to being a plugin? I understand website authors likes to brag how awesome their website is. I wouldn't like for the message to appear there which screams "a forum living on borrowed time".
Title: Re: More useless nonsense
Post by: Powerbob on June 19th, 2013, 10:36 AM
I agree, optional or a plugin is a good idea.
Title: Re: More useless nonsense
Post by: Dragooon on June 19th, 2013, 11:15 AM
Kill it with fire!
Title: Re: More useless nonsense
Post by: Arantor on June 19th, 2013, 05:05 PM
I wouldn't even bother with a plugin. To me it is not merely superfluous information. If you have it present, you need to be consistently growing over time otherwise it's going to make life harder.

Let me give you a few examples.

phpBB.com:
Quote
Most users ever online was 8680 on Mon Mar 19, 2007 1:28 am
(doesn't list the most online today)


community.invisionpowercom
Quote
8,629 Most Online
(with a tooltip for the date, 01 May 2013, doesn't show the most online today)


mybb.com (using May 2013 snapshot because their site is currently down)
Quote
The most users online at one time was 1,777 on 08-11-2012 at 03:05 AM
(again, doesn't show the most online today)


simplemachines.org
Quote
Most Online Today: 1,594. Most Online Ever: 3,726 (January 18, 2008, 10:00:17 PM)
Which of these is growing? Which of these is not growing?

When you're a little forum, you're likely to be growing (if you're actually growing it) in a fashion where this is useful. When you're a medium sized forum or larger, you *need* to keep growing at a semi-constant pace to keep this value bumped. In other words once you go beyond 'small', this is problematic rather than helpful, and the longer it is since you last peaked, the more clear it is that you're not really growing.

The fact that SMF peaked 5 years ago and phpBB peaked 6 years ago is suggestive of their relative states of growth and activity. (XenForo doesn't even have it)

This is why I'd suggest removing it rather than making it a plugin; there is not really a situation where it's actually helpful.
Title: Re: More useless nonsense
Post by: Nao on June 19th, 2013, 06:21 PM
Have an argument in its defense. Please wait until I'm on my PC.

In the meantime... why not simply show this only to admins..? Problem solved...
Title: Re: More useless nonsense
Post by: Hristo on June 19th, 2013, 06:44 PM
Does this mean you want to remove the "Most Online" column on Forum History stat's page? If yes, then I do not like the idea. As an admin I would like to see that. It could be useful info when you do advertising etc...
But I really do like the idea if it's accessible only for admins.
Title: Re: More useless nonsense
Post by: Arantor on June 19th, 2013, 09:27 PM
@Nao: Why bother? It's not a stat that is meaningful. Dropping the line entirely means saving queries and stuff.

@Hristo: No, that is not what I said. I said the line specifically on the info centre, I even quoted which line I meant.

Mind you, while we're on the subject, the entire concept of 'most online' is a meaningless figure that makes no sense and cannot possibly be accurate and should be excluded.

I would note that XenForo not only doesn't have that figure, doesn't even track it historically and no-one asks for it that I can find.

See, here's the thing. Those people who don't care about the visitor count aren't going to care that it's gone, and those people who do actually care aren't going to use it anyway because they're going to integrate Google Analytics and/or Piwik or similar.
Title: Re: More useless nonsense
Post by: xrunner on June 19th, 2013, 10:46 PM
Well here's the line off of my forum -

Most Online Today: 83. Most Online Ever: 238 (August 13, 2008, 04:15:51 AM)

There really weren't 83 meaningful entities online today. No way. Maybe 10 at most "real" members. So yea that number is useless to me.

Most online ever? It just makes it appear that the forum used to be busy but now isn't anymore. People who don't understand it think "Wow dude, your forum used to kick ass and now look - there only eight members online as compared with 238 at one time :lol:


[1]
 1. plus if it's gone you won't have anal retentive people asking if there should be spaces after the parenthesis (ask Arantor for further clarification on this matter :lol:)
Title: Re: More useless nonsense
Post by: Arantor on June 19th, 2013, 11:32 PM
This is exactly what I mean. There is no circumstance where this number is actually meaningful. Incidentally the same deal applies to the stats page too - and why it shouldn't be tracked at all there either.

The whole 'used to be active' deal is a problem and having it on the full stats is just as much of a problem. In fact, probably worse because you're going to be fixated on that crap rather than dealing with the important stuff, more like the number of posts being made. That's a meaningful, trackable and accurate figure to work from because it's absolute (either you have posts or you don't)... but the whole online thing is tricky because bots frequently send multiple 'users', followed by the fact that you are guaranteed to have search engines you don't know about (there are dozens who've been through here lately that no-one had even heard of)... and it's just a waste of time. Lies, damn lies and statistics.

As for that space (not) after the parentheses... don't even go there :lol:
Title: Re: More useless nonsense
Post by: Hristo on June 20th, 2013, 12:13 AM
The thing I mostly like about Most Online column, is that along with the other columns it gives a nice figure. Indeed, most people do not care for such data, but not all. Indeed, it's not accurate as absolute numbers due to bots and such, but for short periods they are relatively constant number, so the line/trend is not that screwed. Web tracking services actually are not better at all for giving the same data, because of the Adblock, Ghostery and alikes. Not every admin has access to the access logs and/or the CP trackers (Awstats in my case).

The Info Center line though is indeed more harmful than beneficial (when the forum is at it's peak, then the big numbers could attract some new members). As I see XenForo has Most Online Users add-on, which is not that unpopular - on the 3rd page for downloads out of 42 atm, so even this has it's fans.
Title: Re: More useless nonsense
Post by: Arantor on June 20th, 2013, 12:22 AM
-sigh- You're never going to convince me on this.

Why are you so insistent on having data that I can *prove* to you is fatally incorrect?
Title: Re: More useless nonsense
Post by: Hristo on June 20th, 2013, 01:07 AM
Quote from Arantor on June 20th, 2013, 12:22 AM
Why are you so insistent on having data that I can *prove* to you is fatally incorrect?
Actually a good question, considering that it's not a big deal for me.
Title: Re: More useless nonsense
Post by: Arantor on June 20th, 2013, 01:21 AM
You were the one that said you didn't like the idea ;)

If it were entirely up to me, I'd have dropped even the count of 'guests' currently online entirely and not had sessions for guests at all, saving an insane amount of performance but for some reason people cling to these slightly odd notions of numbers purport to tell them how busy their site is without actually telling them anything useful in that direction.
Title: Re: More useless nonsense
Post by: Maxx on June 20th, 2013, 01:57 AM
Arantor,
+1
 I feel some of this stuff is not needed and or necessary. If you visit a site, right off you can if peeps are active  on that site, by losoking at the latest posts ( dates) and how many there are, so this is what counts not what happened 3 years ago, ( maybe to the staff only )?
Some site even gun deck the post, visits and stuff or try to find a way to do, useless, information.
If you have site that get millions of visits per day you maybe a winner of some kind revenue , if you have a site that has content that the people want you will not have time to think about the post counts :) and how many were on line, at least not displayed on the pages.
now if your server crashes from over load then, it time for consider; is it worth paying for a new server or note ( upgrade ) and your log will tell you what's up with the traffic from your Cpanel..
allot of stuff is just nice to have, but not needed.
as far as post counts this good for staff and Hero Members, that really contribute to the content of the site and it's subject matter.... however some just post Cow patch stuff to get the post counts, up or to get their sigs noticed for spamming purposes, ( another useless thing , unless for staff and or supporters of the cause!
Not too long ago, I had to delete 4000 members that just lurk and or try to spam, or hack or who cares what, there gone... so this stuff is useless in the long run, but may be of help to the admins, but I don't trust the counts anyway.
The only thing there I think is sometimes helpful, is who is on line and that is also duplicated, once logged in!

 
regards,
Maxx
Title: Re: More useless nonsense
Post by: Nao on June 20th, 2013, 10:30 AM
Quote from Arantor on June 19th, 2013, 09:27 PM
@Nao: Why bother? It's not a stat that is meaningful. Dropping the line entirely means saving queries and stuff.
I can live with the line being removed from the homepage. There's already the record being indicated there, so it's okay to remove the record from the homepage; I can also live with the record being removed from the Stats page, as long as the Online stats are kept in the daily stats.
I'm okay with the 'current day' connection number being removed too, since it can be found in the daily stats, so whatever.
I'm also okay with the daily online stats being hidden from view if you're not allowed to see them.

All in all, it's important to take into account that some admins, at some point in their forum's existence, will rely on these statistics to find more strength to work on their contents. It may be right or wrong, but it doesn't matter: if it's important to some people, we shouldn't remove it entirely.
Granted, it will NOT be important to even a minor portion of regular users, so it's all right to remove everything from *their* view, but admins..? They should still be able to see that.

Regarding guests, I think we agreed a long time ago (although you before me!) that it's okay not to start sessions for guests, and not record them in any kind of statistics, but I'd still like to record them in the Who's Online page, as per their IP address, and show what page they're currently visiting, and whether they're a bot or not. Again, this is the kind of thing that admins may want to know. It's only of interest in the Who's Online page, so I'm pretty sure we can save some processing work outside of these pages, apart of course from recording activity to the log_online table or something.
Still, I'm not sure what takes the most processing time for guests-- session work, or database write work..?
Quote from Arantor on June 19th, 2013, 09:27 PM
I would note that XenForo not only doesn't have that figure, doesn't even track it historically and no-one asks for it that I can find.
xenForo doesn't get everything right...
I, for one, would never have bought it. I'd have bought IPB, had I been forced into buying some forum software. Had I been forced into using some other forum software, though, I wouldn't have bought anything, I would have forked SMF into something cool with a media gallery, a rewritten JS/CSS engine, things like that... Hmm, that's a good idea, actually. I should do that...

So, in short: I chose SMF because I liked it better than the competition. While I have no qualms with removing things from SMF that were short-sighted, I don't think that "just because someone else does it differently", it's reason enough to question a feature that's already in SMF and Wedge, and don't forget that removing stuff will also get you support requests like, "My forum ain't working properly!", "How do I put this feature back into Wedge?", or "You should remove your stupid [Wedge-specific new feature that we all like but take some adjusting to] instead of [SMF-specific old feature that this person liked], sucker! I'm off to [SMF fork that just started and is obviously not going to take off, but whatever your fancy], and [expletive] you!"

I, for one, would like to minimize the number of support requests, be they paid or not...

That's, basically, all I had to say about the subject, I think...
Quote from Arantor on June 19th, 2013, 09:27 PM
See, here's the thing. Those people who don't care about the visitor count aren't going to care that it's gone, and those people who do actually care aren't going to use it anyway because they're going to integrate Google Analytics and/or Piwik or similar.
Back in the day, when I cared about stats, I never used GA, for two reasons:
- it always gave very small numbers, like 10x smaller than SMF gave me, so I didn't trust it much,
- I always got NSL issues with their script, and at the time, it tended to make Opera go cwaaaazy...

So, I was quite happy to have a simple stats page.
Title: Re: More useless nonsense
Post by: Maxx on June 20th, 2013, 01:41 PM
What about a link or button to the info center stuff, @Noa you have some great points there also, support and the GA thing, as far as I know GA is still the same at reading your stats, and the link may take out some clutter on the front page and the user/admin will still be happy!

Coffee Time!

regards,
Maxx
Title: Re: More useless nonsense
Post by: Arantor on June 20th, 2013, 06:22 PM
Quote
While I have no qualms with removing things from SMF that were short-sighted, I don't think that "just because someone else does it differently", it's reason enough to question a feature that's already in SMF and Wedge
Yes it is. The question is not 'should we remove it', at least not immediately. It becomes 'why do they do it differently?' XF does it differently because they believe the majority of owners don't care and would rather use GA to do it anyway.
Quote
Back in the day, when I cared about stats, I never used GA, for two reasons:
- it always gave very small numbers, like 10x smaller than SMF gave me, so I didn't trust it much,
There's a very, very good reason for that: bots are not counted. Bots account for a *surprising* percentage of users.

Right now there are 15 guests, 3 users. 1 of those guests is listed as a known bot, but of the other 14 guests, 5 of those are bots that we currently do not track. (But I'm adding the ones I can see to the list so we can differentiate them)

/mewill reply to the rest later on when not busy bashing code.
Title: Re: More useless nonsense
Post by: Nao on June 20th, 2013, 06:48 PM
Quote from Arantor on June 20th, 2013, 06:22 PM
Yes it is. The question is not 'should we remove it', at least not immediately. It becomes 'why do they do it differently?' XF does it differently because they believe the majority of owners don't care and would rather use GA to do it anyway.
I'd say, they don't do it because they started their stuff from scratch, and there are tons of things they couldn't bother to implement before they actually went 'gold'...
Quote
There's a very, very good reason for that: bots are not counted. Bots account for a *surprising* percentage of users.
Does Google keep track of all existing bots anyway..? :P

And yes, this is probably the reason, but I'm thinking that they were very, very liberal with what a bot is...
Title: Re: More useless nonsense
Post by: Arantor on June 20th, 2013, 06:53 PM
Quote
I'd say, they don't do it because they started their stuff from scratch, and there are tons of things they couldn't bother to implement before they actually went 'gold'...
You kind of have to watch their community to fathom out the approach on this one... it isn't really about what they could or couldn't be bothered to implement. It's more about what they feel is important - and they have a serious track record of listening to their customers.
Quote
Does Google keep track of all existing bots anyway..? :P
No, but it doesn't have to, that's sort of the point.

GA runs in JS on the client side. Bots don't generally run JavaScript. As a result, GA's figures are likely to be far more accurate in that respect. They're wrong in other respects, e.g. browser share because whatever the site owner uses is likely to skew the stats somewhat, but most site owners don't really care too much about that.
Title: Re: More useless nonsense
Post by: Arantor on June 20th, 2013, 09:45 PM
Just to update:
Quote
8 Guests, 3 Users (0 Contacts, 7 Spiders)
Users active in past 15 minutes:
Arantor, (hidden user) , Dragooon, UptimeRobot (2), Panopta, Google (2), Exabot, AhrefsBot
This is why the hit count is normally so messed up.
Title: Re: More useless nonsense
Post by: emanuele on June 28th, 2013, 02:47 PM
Quote from Arantor on June 20th, 2013, 01:21 AM
If it were entirely up to me, I'd have dropped even the count of 'guests' currently online entirely and not had sessions for guests at all
If it were entirely up to me I would have dropped even the topics' view counter... :angel:
Title: Re: More useless nonsense
Post by: Nao on June 28th, 2013, 04:30 PM
Looks like UptimeRobot (which isn't in the official list -- should I commit my addition?), Panopta and AhrefsBots are in there ALL THE TIME... Impressive. What a bunch of loser bots...

@emanuele, are you doing it in Elk, then..? ;)
Yeah, topic views aren't very important in general, but sometimes -- sometimes -- when you're posting a message and you're desperate for an answer, looking at the view count is a way to pass the time, ah ah...
IIRC, view count only records members..? Hmm no, I probably don't remember well, hmm...
Title: Re: More useless nonsense
Post by: Arantor on June 28th, 2013, 07:16 PM
UptimeRobot visits every 5 minutes to see if the site's up or not (and hands out RSS feeds about it), the others I'm not sure about what they are but they are regular bot visitors who seem to be crawlers of some kind.

View count used to count everyone, I believe we changed it to count only non-robots (but that still depends on having the robots set up in the first place)
Title: Re: More useless nonsense
Post by: Nao on June 28th, 2013, 07:32 PM
I added Panopta and Ahsomething to my robots.txt file, dunno about UptimeRobot yet, though...
Title: Re: More useless nonsense
Post by: emanuele on June 28th, 2013, 07:35 PM
Quote from Nao on June 28th, 2013, 04:30 PM
@emanuele, are you doing it in Elk, then..? ;)
I have to propose it...but I suppose that there are many people that want it... :( ...but...but...
/mehaz to think about it
Quote from Nao on June 28th, 2013, 04:30 PM
Yeah, topic views aren't very important in general, but sometimes -- sometimes -- when you're posting a message and you're desperate for an answer, looking at the view count is a way to pass the time, ah ah...
And ask questions like: "Come on 100 views and not a single answer!!! ANSWER ME!!!11!!1!"

50 messages! :D
Title: Re: More useless nonsense
Post by: Arantor on June 28th, 2013, 07:45 PM
I wonder why we place so much importance on these numbers that, in the scheme of things, really don't make that much sense.

I find it interesting that WordPress does not keep a view count per article. Or if it does, it's not actually shown in their ACP anywhere I can find. I wonder what the logic of not doing so is.

There are certainly cases on sm.org of threads having obscenely high view counts unnaturally quickly (rising tens of thousands inside an hour)
Title: Re: More useless nonsense
Post by: Nao on June 28th, 2013, 09:19 PM
Another thing with topic views, is that without them, you lose an entry in the stats page, which is not always the same as topic replies, although we could rework this to only request topics that aren't in both stat columns, etc... :^^;:

Nope, WP has never supported this. They expect you to rely exclusively on external statistics tools. It wasn't pleasant.
Title: Re: More useless nonsense
Post by: Arantor on June 28th, 2013, 09:47 PM
But that's the thing: if you're using external statistics tools, they're likely to be more accurate... or if you don't care about them, you don't have the overhead of tracking them.

We're back to the notion of 'if you don't care, why have the hit, but if you do care, you'll use something more accurate anyway'
Title: Re: More useless nonsense
Post by: Nao on June 29th, 2013, 04:12 PM
This consideration might have been important years ago, but nowadays web hosting is generally done on powerful CPUs with lots of RAM etc, and an extra SQL query (or not) is usually not so important... Just look at the Wedge codebase, literally for every page it runs dozens of preg calls, many queries, does thousands of tests, and yet you're aware that our software is extremely fast, because most of the work is done over the network and the client, more than the server, so is it that big a deal, anyway..?

In any case, I'd at least like to keep the topic views enabled for members, and drop guests altogether, I wouldn't mind that too much really, but that's really the best I can do right now, I reckon...
Title: Re: More useless nonsense
Post by: Arantor on June 29th, 2013, 06:07 PM
See, that's the sort of attitude that vBulletin has - 'the server is crazy fast so we don't need to be so careful' and it's why they end up with 60+ queries every page.

Just because we can doesn't mean we should. More importantly, though, remember that every cycle taken up by one run is a cycle not available for other users on the same server. The bigger and meaner Wedge is, the fewer concurrent users it can support.

In this particular case, I sort of agree with you, that an extra query may not be so important. But what the query *is* can be. Right now the installer pushes everything to MyISAM. Updating a MyISAM table even for a single row means a full table lock. The topics table is not a fixed width table and as such it doesn't get the extra boost for such tables.

There is a surprising amount of work being carried out by the server each page run, and more than it needs to be.
Title: Re: More useless nonsense
Post by: live627 on June 29th, 2013, 08:04 PM
Quote
Right now the installer pushes everything to MyISAM
Couldn't it be modified to push InnoDB without worries?
Title: Re: More useless nonsense
Post by: Arantor on June 29th, 2013, 08:28 PM
There are side issues with InnoDB... it's possible but very awkward to disable MyISAM but it's easy to disable InnoDB and some hosts still do. Fortunately as MySQL/MariaDB 5.5+ get adopted, it is becoming less common for InnoDB to be disabled. But right now it's still pretty common.
Title: Re: More useless nonsense
Post by: live627 on June 29th, 2013, 09:12 PM
ouch
Title: Re: More useless nonsense
Post by: godboko71 on June 29th, 2013, 10:34 PM
@Nao you are over estimating hosts, the average site is on shared hosting, most of which is oversold. Almost be nice it stats where a plugin.
Title: Re: More useless nonsense
Post by: Arantor on June 29th, 2013, 11:56 PM
Actually making it a plugin isn't a huge problem for the most part.
Title: Re: More useless nonsense
Post by: Nao on June 30th, 2013, 12:24 AM
What if we rename views to something else like reach or popularity, then we can get away with counting only members..? Also, maybe count only one visit per member?
Title: Re: More useless nonsense
Post by: Arantor on June 30th, 2013, 12:44 AM
Counting a view per member implies tracking who's seen what, something we currently don't do, but something a surprising number of people seem to want to do (and we can't do it based on read status because that gets purged by board-read-status)

Here's a thought... the view count is screwed in any case because while you navigating a multipage topic won't count views, if you view a topic, then there's a reply, then you view it later to see the reply, that's now two views.
Title: Re: More useless nonsense
Post by: emanuele on June 30th, 2013, 09:20 PM
Quote from Arantor on June 28th, 2013, 07:45 PM
I find it interesting that WordPress does not keep a view count per article. Or if it does, it's not actually shown in their ACP anywhere I can find. I wonder what the logic of not doing so is.
Nope, no tracking (and I remember quite well because I installed the counterize plugin with a lot of stats...except after very few time I run out of db space (cheap Italian host :angel: ) because of it and I deleted everything without any regret (except that I wanted to improve it, but never found time to make the changes I wanted) and moved to an external tool, and then forgot about the external tool, I think it's still there somewhere lol)
Quote from Arantor on June 28th, 2013, 07:45 PM
There are certainly cases on sm.org of threads having obscenely high view counts unnaturally quickly (rising tens of thousands inside an hour)
Yep, I remember some of those, it was funny to see the number increase refresh after refresh... LOL
Title: Re: More useless nonsense
Post by: Arantor on July 4th, 2013, 06:47 PM
OK, so it's been a few days since I started this debate off.

I've periodically checked the 'most online' stat through that time and since I actually added some of the bots to it that we're seeing, I can't remember the last time when the number of guests actually exceeded the number of bots. Like right now - 8 Guests, 3 Users (0 Contacts, 7 Spiders) - as in, of the 8 guests we have right now, 7 are bots.

I'm actually skeptical of half the guests we have, too. I've seen blatantly fake user agents (one that just says 'Mozilla' which no browser I know uses), I've seen a disproportionately high number of Opera users, and a lot of Firefox users going back to versions anywhere between 3.5 and 15, typically 12-15.

And if we remove bots from this count, it's going to look lower than before, of course which will cause lots of ERMAHGERD MA STATS IS LOWERZ for convertees. And if we keep it, we drastically exaggerate the counts of users and hits which is how come the hit rate is 8-10x higher than what Google Analytics reports.