Who's Online inaccurate?

[Pixelgun]

I just finished doing a patch on a client site tonight. I had taken the site offline before starting the patch update and when I finished patching I took the site back online and checked to make sure everything was working. Who's Online immediately reported "8 guests online". I checked with Woopra, a realtime webstats and user tracking app (already 4 different extensions for Joomla supporting Woopra!) and found it reporting only me on the site. I have notice many times that Woopra reports far fewer users on the site than the Who's Online module does.

Is the Who's Online module accurate? What does it track to come up with the numbers it does? Could the extra users be search engine bots?

I would appreciate any info on this. If it were my site I'd just remove the module but I think my client would complain if it suddenly disappeared.

Dave

[brad]

Check your server access log for the 'real' definitive answer as to who/how many are visiting your site.

[dpminusa]

I use webmin to administer MySQL. When I suspect the guest count to be off, I look at the jos_sessions table. The records are there. I have not determined how to dissect the fields to get more data. This would give me more clues.

Is there an extension, or a framework function, that analyzes the data field in the session record to parse this?

I would like to monitor this closer.

I use webalizer and my own custom analyzer, but this is indirect.

Any ideas?

Thanks.

[Ghonjez]

Hi...

For accurate Who's online, I've used tool from http://whos.amung.us/
That tool is Real Time for analyze. Also provide good Stats report.

Hope this helps.
Regards.

[navbgsim]

It is always a Good idea to have GA, Woopra & an internal tool... Even GA does not report live links. For complete confirmation check ur website logs.

[dpminusa]

One quirk I found after installing Joomla was that Apache server-status and server-info no longer work. The index.php in Joomla intercepts these and returns a 404.

Does anyone know a work-aroung to get these going again?

dpminusa

[lowtech]

I installed the Whosonline extension and I immediately had 62 unregistered viewers shown. It later rose to 90 something and then dropped to 52. Is it a coincidence that I have 52 Twitter followers for the website? Does anyone know if the Twitter feed is read as an online viewer if the subscriber's browser is open? My firestats does not indicate I have that many on line at any one time. On the other hand, Jos_sessions does indicate viewers equalling the Whosonline count.

Thanks much,

Lowtech