Tracking Pages Visited by Members

[meemzo]

Is there a log that shows the pages a member has visited in the past.....day, week or whatever?

[Arantor]

No, there isn't. Such a log would likely consume a lot of database space.

Curious: what were you hoping to find out?

[meemzo]

The log wouldn't have to be big if it's set to only the last 1,2,3 days etc.  I guess seeing their viewing habits and other nefarious reasons.    But it there is an option to show who's viewing the thread, so I didn't think a log was too much of a leap.

[Arantor]

Except the overhead of managing that is surprising, actually. It's all work that has to be done by the server.

The thing about the 'who's viewing the thread' is that the space requirement is not vast since it only stores the 'current' URL and even that gets turned off on some performance-sensitive sites. Storing enough information to build a useful log for people effectively means storing every URL they visit, which is complicated for just members - and beyond impractical if you factor in guests.

Experience says the actual data it would give you is likely to not be especially useful on a high level (if you're looking for trends) and questionable in terms of privacy invasion on a more specific level.

Google Analytics is also not especially useful for similar reasons in my experience, though that's compounded by the fact it doesn't necessarily know how to differentiate users (meaning that a few very active users can sway the logs compared to everyone else)

[Kindred]

And think about this...    If I have 100 active users, visiting a page every two minutes... That quickly grows the log to huge sizes...

[Hristo]

There is a mod for that - Topic View Log. Probably not exactly what you want, but close enough.

Its old thread is here:
http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=251656.0
Its new download place:
http://www.smfsimple.com/index.php?action=downloads;sa=view;download=147

[meemzo]

Nice, thank you!