What is "user visits" on the admin dashboard?

I am trying to understand how many people are logging into my discourse every day, and tracking that from day to day. Is that the “user visits” stat, or does that include multiple visits by the same user?

Is there a way to see who precisely has logged in on a given day?

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The closest I know of is by going to Users -> Active (currently not filterable by date)

Less that what I think you’re asking for, but depending on how many visitors you get and how often you check it might be of some help.

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The /about page has the number of users who were seen in the last week+month.

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That’s awesome - thanks! I had actually turned that page off for reasons that I will post in a new topic.

Does “user visits” only include logged in users, or does it include anonymous users as well?

Nope only registered, logged in users are counted there.

If “user visit” is only logged in users, is there a metric that tracks visits from everyone?

Yes, that is called Google Analytics :wink:

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Or Mixpanel for analytics :).

Got it, “Total visits” metric is not in the /admin dashboard.

What does “User Visits” mean exactly?
If I go to the Discourse site, browse a bit, close the tab and come back an hour later in a new browser tab/window, while I am still the same person, same browser, will this count as 2 user visits or just 1?
What if I do the same, but my second visit is from a different device with the same user account?
What about users who are not logged in and only read? Do they count as user visits too?

BTW: The post below is not an answer, it lacks a precise definition of what the user visits are.

No. It means logged in users. You could be on 50 different devices and you are the same logged in user.

Not logged in users come through as anonymous users.

I think I am a little confused on how “User Visits” varies from “Logged In” pageviews.

My current understanding after reading a few different threads is:

User visits are unique logged in users that have been in the forum per the time period (today, yesterday, last 7 days, etc).
Logged In Pageviews are every pageview for those same logged in users.

So if a user was in the forum and viewed 10 different pages, their user visit would be 1 and logged in pageviews would be 10.

Please correct me if I am wrong.

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Sounds about right to me!

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@codinghorror I’m using the data explorer plugin to create a daily stats table. For user_visits, is it possible for a user to have more than one visit in a day? Or do all visits in a day get chunked into the same row? I’m seeing 1 daily visit as the max and I’m wondering if there’s an error in my query or if there’s actually a limit on this.

Thanks for everything you do :slight_smile:

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A user can only have one entry per day in the user_visits table. The table has a unique index on user_id,visited_at. The posts_read field of the day’s visits will get updated as the user reads more posts.

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Where can I find the time Discourse starts counting it’s (our) day for user visits - or more accurately, where can I find the time the user visit routine runs. We have one user who has been trying to figure it out - to no avail in a couple of months. :slightly_smiling_face: He has apparently missed 2 days in the past quarter.

It’s usually 00:00 UTC which is server time.

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Hello,

After reading this thread, we are still a bit confused what “user visits” means? Is it unique users for the time span that you select?

For example,

Here it says we had 286 user visits in February, but we only have 97 users in our forum.

Can you please clarify?

Thank you,
Cat

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Hi Cat,

To answer your question here:

The User Visits report shows the total number of User Visits in the forum for the selected time period (today, yesterday, last 7 days, month, etc).

Specifically, a User Visit is counted anytime a unique logged in user visits the site, up to once per day.

For example, if a user visited a site every day within a week, Discourse would count that as 7 user visits. This is why it’s possible to have more user visits in a month than your site has total users.

If you’re interested, you can also view the Ruby Code for this report here as well: discourse/app/models/concerns/reports/visits.rb

I hope this helps! :slightly_smiling_face:

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