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Joined: Jan 2007
Posts: 170
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Joined: Jan 2007
Posts: 170
Some online communities show a number for Who's Online that seems to represents any member who may actually be at their computer and surfing the web - not necessarily logged into the community. When one clicks on the link (the number they are using for members who are online) it is then revealed that only a tenth of the number represented to be online are actually logged into the community site.

Even though this seems a bit dishonest, I can see the benefits of this as I am sure the vast majority of visitors (and even members) looking at the Who's Online Number just assume that is the number of members currently active in the community - giving the impression that the community is extremely vibrant which may attract more members etc.

When sites that are competing for the same audience as me are doing this one feels slightly disadvantaged.

What are your thoughts on this? Any idea how this is done?


UBB user since 1998
Joined: Dec 2006
Posts: 1,235
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veteran
Joined: Dec 2006
Posts: 1,235
The only thing that I would like to add would be the ability to extend the WOL count to external (none UBB) areas of your site.

I have turned my site around so it is now working from within the UBB scripts, just so that I can show user's on my index page amongst others. Before this I was using a script that worked on templates to build and update my listings pages via cron but I could not get the WOL to show visitors to these areas. I would say that 75 to 80% of my traffic was outside of the UBB so was never accounted for. Now, even though I don't like the functionality of my site very much and have had to make some cut backs, I know that all of my traffic is registered by WOL.


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