bbPress

How do I enable GeoIP (country codes) and flags?

• While the mysql lookup for geoip is much faster, it is not available yet to the public, instead you can use the IP2C method which although slower, is much easier to install

• create a new sub-directory in the same folder as mini-track.php called "ip2c" ie. /my-plugins/mini-track/ip2c/

• download these two files and put them in there http://firestats.cc/browser/trunk/ip2c/ip-to-country.bin?format=raw http://firestats.cc/browser/trunk/ip2c/php/ip2c.php?format=raw

• find the option $mini_track_options['geoip'] = near the top of mini-track.php and set it to "ip2c" ie. $minitrackoptions['geoip'] = "ip2c";

• if you also want country flags shown instead of country codes, you need to install the 80 or so country flags in png format one free source of the flags is the famfamfam site: http://www.famfamfam.com/lab/icons/flags/famfamfamflagicons.zip you need to extract the png folder in the zip to your own image sub-directory, ie. /images/flags/

• find the option $mini_track_options['flags'] = near the top of mini-track.php and set it to the path of your flags images ie. $minitrackoptions['flags'] = "/images/flags/";

There are duplicates of users or dates are wrong ?

• If you upgrade from an old version you need to use the RESET link in the mini-track display panel.

• If you see repeats of the same IP's in the real-time display, that means the user is going through a proxy. Some bots like yahoo's slurp will connect to your site many times in a row from the same external IP, but a different computer in their network: Mini-Track can detect and follow this.

Does this slow down my website?

• I highly recommend you put this line in your bb-config.php

  $bb->load_options = true;

That will make all options load at once when bbPress starts.

• It is NOT recommended to use this on forums with more than a few dozen visitors at a time (because of the complex string serialization/deserialization)

I know there are more people online than Mini Track is showing ?

• Note the (old) method this plugin uses, indexing by plain IP only, has some limitations. If you get more than one person from one IP, only one person will be tracked. If you run bbPress on an intranet or multiple people often visit from the same proxy like a school, this makes it useless.

If it's a problem for anyone, you could take the md5 of the IP plus the User Agent plus any proxy headers and use that as an index instead. I didn't do that by default because it would be considerably slower and doubles the size of the key (and serialized string).

The md5 technique is now used by default. You can disable it if you want and use the old IP method at the expense of missing multiple NAT/proxy visitors.

It's missing this or that feature ...

• The core of this plugin was written in 15 minutes to demonstrate how easy it is to write plugins for bbPress. (It is meant as a temporary substitute until the full "User Track" plugin is released much later this year.)