Number of Members Currently Online

[zeusthemoose]

Hi there,

    My suggestion is a counter of how many members are currently online (in the member statistics bar). I think it would be useful so you don't post when barely anyone is online (if there is a time when not many are on) and your post doesn't get buried by the time more people are online.

[Eigenvektor]

You could maybe measure the average number of page loads over the last few minutes, but "online" isn't really something a website can do. Even if I'm signed in, I'm not necessarily online, since I can close my browser and come back at a later time and still be signed in.

[LinusTech]

We used to have one.

 

iirc it was an attack vector of some sort so we canned it.

 

No plans to bring it back

[LogicalDrm]

5 minutes ago, LinusTech said:

We used to have one.

 

iirc it was an attack vector of some sort so we canned it.

 

No plans to bring it back

Needless resource-hog if memory serves. Same with that which showed members viewing the thread.

[colonel_mortis]

There were a couple of issues with it. One was that it was not very accurate, which meant that the "max online users" counter was stuck at a count from Jan 2016, just before we updated the forum software, and that was bugging me. The other was that it was having a significant impact on page load performance, for very little benefit.

 

I think the performance impact may have been addressed, but it's a fairly difficult thing to test and I don't have all of the tools that would be needed to properly measure the impact if we turned it back on.

 

In terms of your specific problem, online active users doesn't change massively throughout the day, but it's lowest at about 9am UTC and highest around 9pm UTC. Less online users means less topics being posted, so your topic stays in Recent Topics for longer, so it's not a clear benefit to posting when everyone's online.