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