[answered]Number of Users

The home page and all pages outside of the /forums/ directory use separate code that is loosely integrated with the forum database.

You might note that one the "who's online" page you will never see visitors or members that are shown to be viewing the home page.

So basically the home page ect have sessions that work differently than the forum. In the forum it's important to maintain a level of session security that is not needed on the home page (since the home page just displays content and does not alter even viewcount etc.

So on the main pages of the site, the number indicates all users on the forums AND the main pages. While the who's online list is only who is in the /forums/ directory.

That's why the list never says anyone is on the home page.

Thanks for the explanation!

Also, some of these numbers lag for a few minutes, e. g. the reading is for up to 5 minutes ago.

The numbers are not perfect for lots of reasons. Using the back button can pull from cache for e.g and not update an active session. Some pages do not use sessions to lessen the load on the database server, and most of all because on the forum pages I disabled guest sessions so the users who do not sign in or get a cookie generate very few sessions because they have no session ID.

The actual server logs report many times that number of file requests but since I removed the session ID in the URLs for guests batches of them appear to be a single user on the who'd online list.

The opposite can also be true. A guest can sometimes appear twice on the list because each session is open for 5 minutes. Dometimes because of the way I altered the sessions the guests get a new session instead of renewing the old one.