Statistics Center Accuracy

[njtweb]

Forum History (using forum time offset) at the bottom of the page.

How accurate is that with respect to realistic stats. Realistic being actual human interactivity not bots? Do the views per day include bot activity? Or are those stats representative of guest and membership activity?

Thank you

[drewactual]

cache's gonna cache that thing up, man.   it's important to set php derivative files to A0 in maxlife directives in your htaccess....

insofar as extrapolating the 'bots and probes from the actual users........ you can pull the IP but you can't see what port.  you can see where they're at, but most of those 'guests' are probes.  I've had in excess of 30k on the page at once, and average just shy of 1k a day.... actual members and consistent lurkers? = maybe 150.  i can always tell when a sitemap is being indexed, or some such- and they aren't always announced as 'bots. 

if you want real time no goof reports, google analytics or facebook pixel will give them to you... these are for actual initiated sessions (which you should have set to start immediately and w/o exception).  the probes only touch the page for the briefest moment.  SMF records those; Analytics does not.

[Kindred]

the stats at the bottom of the page and in post-views include guests/bots as well as members...

[njtweb]

cache's gonna cache that thing up, man.   it's important to set php derivative files to A0 in maxlife directives in your htaccess....

insofar as extrapolating the 'bots and probes from the actual users........ you can pull the IP but you can't see what port.  you can see where they're at, but most of those 'guests' are probes.  I've had in excess of 30k on the page at once, and average just shy of 1k a day.... actual members and consistent lurkers? = maybe 150.  i can always tell when a sitemap is being indexed, or some such- and they aren't always announced as 'bots. 

if you want real time no goof reports, google analytics or facebook pixel will give them to you... these are for actual initiated sessions (which you should have set to start immediately and w/o exception).  the probes only touch the page for the briefest moment.  SMF records those; Analytics does not.

Ok, I appreciate the info. Kindred's answer was more along the line of what I was looking for. I'm not as savvy with any of the programming or data analytics side. I don't find webmaster tools or google analytics to be of much use either. That's why I was asking about the stats page, it's easy to read and understand.