Users online of the scale??

[Alphagamer]

Hello,

I have a forum about computer games. It's not very big(80 members, about 5 tot 15 average users online).

At this moment there is something really strange going on.

Currently Active Users: 467
There are currently 4 members and 463 guests on the boards. | Most users ever online was 478 on 01-20-2002 at 17:55.
Alpha, Jasper, Sensei, Vanquish

Now I'm a little

Can this be a bug or something? When I view who is online I see different Ip's.

Anybody ever had this?

[George L]

what's so strange ??

there are 4 members and 463 guests hence = 4 + 463 = 467 current users online

[Alphagamer]

Uhmm??

Increase of only 450 visiters. Ok, that's normal, from 5 to 465 in 5 minutes.

[Fusion]

Actually, alphagamer has picked up on a feature I tried to draw attention to last november. If you enter a board with no cookies or auto-login in effect, the guest-entry is left behind for an abnormally long period once you do login. If you get that repeatedly over a short period of time, you'll end up with hundreds and hundreds of ghosted guests. That's a bug, because the guest-session should be killed off at the moment the login is validated. (You may move it to the bugs-forum now, eva. )

[Joshua Clinard]

If that is true, then this really is a bug! Wow, I want that fixed.

[Fusion]

It's easily tested, Joshua. I racked up 900 ghosts in 3 mins when activly forcing the issue. Granted, it's not a mission-critical bug, but it will throw off stats etc. if you count guests.

[tubedogg]

This would not be the same thing, though. In your case the IPs would be all the same and alphagamer said they weren't in his case.

[Fusion]

Yep, the IPs are identical, that's how I first spotted it back in November. I'm sure some of Alphagamer's crowd were real guests, yet I'm equally sure many of them were identical, either due to this bug or the simple fact that someone was hammering his board. It's very unlikely that a board that normally has a very modest user-base gets such a spike within such a short time-span under normal circumstances.

[Alphagamer]

I think Fusion is right. I think it was Ghost guest thingy. Because after about an hour everything returned to normal.

Currently Active Users: 5
There are currently 3 members and 2 guests on the boards. | Most users ever online was 698!!!!! on 01-20-2002 at 18:02.
Alpha, The Brick, Vanquish

[mrlister]

If the IPs were different did you check if there was anything in the logs or maybe referrers. Another possibility is those IPs might have been proxies.

[Alphagamer]

Hey Fusion

How did you test it? Do you know why this happens?

It happend again today. Not as many as yesterday, but it happend again

[mrlister]

check your access_log file. It's usually within the /log from the root directory

[Fusion]

Re: Hey Fusion

Originally posted by Alphagamer
How did you test it? Do you know why this happens?

It happend again today. Not as many as yesterday, but it happend again

Argh.. Sorry I haven't been around, the major bulk of my PCs got the sniffles, they all decided they wanted a new ethernet-card.

I tested it by writing a small script that goes to the site, logs in, logs out again, then back in a loop. If you run that with no cookes or auto-login you'll start off as a guest each time you return to the site.

[tubedogg]

Exactly. With no cookies, the site can't recognize you. If it assumed solely based on IP addresses, everyone behind proxies (or other ways that users share IP addresses) would be assumed to be the same person, which you of all people would recognize is bad.

[Fusion]

Heheh, point taken. Still, it's a tad cumbersome. Only an afterthought, but couldn't the guest session-hash be extended to include some running "unique" marker, so that once that guest logs in, it can be removed from that group? After all, we are just mere numbers.