Explanation Requested, about User's online/views bug?

[Former Member]

I'm a regular member on a proboards forum, but I noticed a strange thing that happens and I see that I'm not the only one who has seen this happen. Every now and again, the "Users Online in the Last 24 Hours" clears out completely, the "User's Online" also seems to bug out when this happens, and each time, the views for all the posts lowers. Can anyone explain why this happens? It happens very frequently, and even when it seems to be "fixed" the views never go back to what they were before the bug happened. 

Things like this can affect traffic (if a new person comes along at the wrong time and sees there are low views, no one has been online, etc, they're going to think the board is dead and leave) and can also be discouraging for some members. 

I know you're gonna fix it, I saw the other posts, but I want to know WHY it happens, can we please have an explanation for why these bugs consistently happen all the time? If this is the wrong place to ask for an explanation please let me know and direct me to the right place.

[Brian]

Hi, @desde.

Various parts of the forum are served by different mechanisms on our end. The pageviews and users online are both handled by the same system, so if you ever see one of them not serving the data correctly the other is likely to be presenting the same issue.

As for why it happens, if the system serving the data goes down or runs into an error with a specific set of data the issues you're seeing now can arise. We're still recording any new views and users that come online and have redundancy for the forum's various statistics so that no data is lost.

Jun 12, 2018 10:51:40 GMT -8 @desde said:

can we please have an explanation for why these bugs consistently happen all the time?

I'd have to ask you to cite a source for this statistic. As you can tell just from viewing the first page we get a bunch of threads reporting this any time this happens so even without being in direct contact with our systems team we get a good feel for how frequently this issue occurs. Based on those two things "all the time" is a bit of an overstatement.

[telh]

This happens for my site (at least with the users online/were online area) but usually with another refresh of the site, it's fixed ^^ I've yet to notice the page views though.

[Former Member]

I can't tell you how many times I've seen it but I've seen it a lot, I wondered for a long time before I came back here to the support forum to post about it, and I've been using proboards consistently for over a year, been seeing this bug throughout the time I've been using proboards Brian