Visitors online reading v high

[fatpeter]

I use the counter only to display visitors online. It has worked perfectly for several months on 2 sites but now on one of the sites it is reading very high. I have it set to 60 minutes, my traffic hasn't changed and it is showing treble what it normally shows.

Any ideas?

Andy

[Patrick]

Without any real comparison I do not know.

Some mistakes that people have made in the past that leads to higher numbers include:
a) Including the counter on multiple pages that are then included on a single page.
b) Including the counter on a page that is being visited by a cron job or automated task.
c) Changing counter time settings while in use, including changing any recycle settings or similar.

I cannot troubleshoot further without more information. For example, "very high" is a bit ambiguous since I do not know if "very high" means 50 more or if it means 1,000,000 more. I know you said three times, but I do not know what your original value you may have been ;).

Fortunately, I began including what I used to use to troubleshoot these matters. You can verify the counter's IP addresses by visiting /counter/stats/index.php?p=allvisitors in your browser. That page will show each IP that is being associated with a single visit. To calculate the "online" count, simply count the number of IPs that are less than 60 minutes (or 1 hour) old.

If the above checks out then those ARE your correct stats. Those IPs didn't come out of nowhere (the script simply does not have that ability ;)).

If you think the above looks incorrect, then you can post or message me the link to the URL above and I can take a look myself to see what may be happening.

[fatpeter]

Hi Patiek thanks for the reply.

Thanks for the link too /counter/stats/index.php?p=allvisitors

I didn't even realise that was there!!!

My online visitor count normally showed around between 50-100 depending on time of day and when i looked yesterday it was creeping up towards 300 online which I knew from my other stats program wasn't right.

It seems to have gone back to it's normal levels now so I think it probably was nothing wrong with the counter...maybe i was just being visited by lots of robots.

Well thanks for your help anyway. I love the counter.

Cheers

Andy