So many guests?

Hi!
I've been using this module for a while now, since Joomla 4 and it works ok.
Yet, I have one question. Sometimes the number of guest users shown is extremely high. I've had up to more than one thousand guest users. Had I a world-famous website, I would understand it😂😂 That's not the case unfortunately. Is there a way to make it more faithful to reality?
Thanks for your tip!
Fabrice

Hello,

The module Names Online uses the same logic as the module Who's Online, released as part of Joomla. My blog site shows 3728 guests, based on the particular rows in _session table of the Joomla database. The scheduled task in System - Managa - Scheduled Tasks - Session GC (Session Garbace Collection or Session Data Purge) should reduce the number of guest sessions, but it remains the same.

That could be a bug or perhaps that is just the way the internet bots work 24/7. On the other hand, it should be possible to adjust the logic of Names Online to count only genuine browser visits from guests and not from bots.

Regards,
toivo

Thank you for this explanation which sounds fair to me. I once read in forums that bots were really active skimming the websites, so that could easily explain why. Yes, a bit of coding could do the job, yet, I wonder why Joomla has never tried to improve their module. This one used to be a must when I had a joomla 1.5 website (old me )
Just a question: do you think I should allow caching (in the global configuration of Joomla) or not to make Names Online work better with users logging off. I sometimes noticed that (most probably because users unproperly log out simply by closing their browser instead of logging out with the button), they remain present in the list suggested by Names Online?
Here are my settings at the moment:
Joomla 5.1.4 (I updated from 4 to 5.1 recently, and everything was working well before)
System cache: on conservative setting
Cache handler: file
Platform specific caching: no
Cache time: 15 minutes

Session handler: database
Session lifetime: 60 minutes
Shared session: no
Track session metadata: yes
Track guest session metadata: yes

Thanks again.

The Names Online shows a large number of guest sessions if the sessions are not removed, a process called Garbage Collection. The Joomla scheduled task 'Session GC' is designed to do that, independent of the Session Handler, whether Database or Filesystem has been selected as the session handler.

The Joomla scheduled tasks may not run at all because of a certain setting in PHP that users in shared servers are unable to change. There is a way around this and it involves a cron job, using the scheduler built into the operating system. Cron jobs are created from the cPanel, the control panel provided by your host. This was explained in detail today in my reply to the topic  Users logged in to the site  in the The Joomla! Forum™ .

Regards,
toivo
 

Update: the cleaning of guest sessions using cron did not work the way I thought it would. Still investigating.