Forum Moderators: rogerd
I don't use this on any forum right now, mainly because it is moderately resource intensive and is distracting (in my opinion).
At the same time, I wonder if this feature is a good community builder. I.e., members feel closer to other members when they see them online (or even browsing the same topic). Since these same forum packages typically offer private messaging (and sometimes links to IM services), there's an opportunity for immediate interaction with a fellow member.
Some members, of course may not welcome such interaction. I always find it a bit spooky when I see myself listed as browsing a particular topic.
I'm curious what other members think of this functionality, and how well it has worked on forums they belong to or administer.
I enable the "Who's Online" functionality on my content site with forums, but I don't have an excessively busy forum so it's not much of an impact.
For a relatively small forum such as mine, it lets people know there's "life out there" -- that they are not alone on the website. It also lets me know how many bots are crawling around on the pages (though I may disable that feature -- I get an occasional email from a forum member worried about 'What all these bots are on your site'.)
My web host maintains a free support forum and I find the "Who's Online" on their forum useful -- I can see how many other customers are online, and how many support techs. I don't have many support issues with my web host, but when I do I can get a relative gauge on how severe an issue they're having by how many other customers and how many techs are online (inverse relationship -- bad problem keeps most of the techs behind the scenes working to resolve the issue, but brings out lots of us customers).
For WebmasterWorld or related forums, I'd be uninterested in knowing who or how many people are online at a given time. The activity in the forums is evidence enough of how alive the community is.
From an admin standpoint, I love it. But I have myself set at hidden - simply because I was getting too many stickies of "I see you're online and wanted to ask you a quick question...." when it easily could have been posted in a thread for a more interactive response from all community members. Any member can choose to be hidden, but admins still see everyone who is online, even the "hidden ones". I do think offering a hidden option is important, because some members like their privacy
The only other potential drawback to this feature is to new sites - if I am a first-time visitor, and I see I have been the only member online in the past 15 minutes during peek surfing hours, I do wonder how active that forum is. If I go to a forum and see there are 50 (or 400!) users online at that time - especially if a huge portion of them are registered, rather than just guests - it says a lot for just how active that forum is. Chances are I'd get my question answered quicker on the forum that has 400 users online than the one where I am the only one on at the time.
Having said that, I agree with Jenstar, if the forum isn't very busy, the who's online can have a negative impact. Most people will not want to join a community that doesn't appear to be active.
I'm not quite sure what to do with the 'identify spiders' feature which Shannon mentioned. I had it enabled at first then when I disabled it many of the forum users complained, apparently they found it more comforting to know that the 'guest' that was attempting to access restricted areas was googlebot and not a hacker!
