Purging sessions

[DV1]

Hi, Everyone

Read a few archived posts on this but thought I'd ask in case things are updated.

'Purging sessions' on the ACP means that if there are ten 'who is online' people that 9 of them will be off the board but I as administrator remain?

For example, I have a couple of test forums and usually it's just me 'who is online'. But for some days now there's been another person continuously so it always reads as '2' online. By the way, it's always as a 'guest', not registered.

I think the ACP method is it but I don't want to mistakenly purge more than what I intend.

Thanks for any suggestions.

Daniel

[warmweer]

I think the ACP method is it but I don't want to mistakenly purge more than what I intend.

Purging sessions will log out all users except for the admin who purged the sessions (I'm not sure about other members that were logged in to the ACP)
It does no harm, but if someone was writing a post then that user will be logged out and will have to reconstruct his post (although by using the back button it may be possible to recuperate the draft - thanks to browser cache).

[DV1]

Thank you, warmweer

Purging the session does remove the 'visitor' whomever it may be but after awhile they return.

I went to the server ACP and by checking visitors I get IPs from Amazonaws, some from hina, Netherlands, etc. I'm going to be asking hosting about that.

What I notice in visitors is they check folders on server. I'm thinking that's going to require a .htaccess file to prevent such.

Lastly, I had a look at this posting: viewtopic.php?t=2622681

Can this 'recurrence' have anything to do with the cookie aspect mentioned in said thread?

Thank You

[thecoalman]

IP's from AWS(and other hosting services) are usually bad bots scraping content. One exception for AWS is Duckduckgo. Check the user agent, if it's Duckduckgo or any bot identifying itself through the user agent and still listed as guest add it to the bots list.

The "Who is online" is based on last activity. Under load settings is "View online time span:" which I believe defaults to 5 minutes. As long as IP/user is making requests within the time span defined it will never go away. Most of these bots can be pretty aggressive but they can also slow walk it trying to fly under the radar. If you have Cpanl look into the Awstats section, there is listing for activity by IP.