Hello.

I have a website with a bussy forum. But ever since I created main index page for the website (before it used to automatically re-direct to the forum automatically when you enter the main domain).

Now my hits to the forum (the guests) is one third of what it was before. This is because the forum is not getting the direct hit anymore. The index.html page is getting all the hits and people click the "FORUM" link to go to the forum.

HOW DO I RECORD FRONT PAGE (index.html) HITS ON THE FORUM? Do I need a code hack or cookie or something?

My users think the traffic to the website has decline dramatically.

Thank you.

how do your visitors know how many hits your forum gets?

I mean the "browsing now" visitors the forum records along with the logged-in usernames.

Total number went down and I want the index page visitors to be counter as guests on the forum.

hmmm.. ok, we're discussing something similar in the dev forum, I'll report back when I hear of something

People are skipping the forums once the hit your new mainpage now?

I used to have a php function that did this, but it got lost when I decided to rewrite my portal. I'll rewrite it maybe tomorrow and get back to you.

There was also the really bad, kludgey way to do it, which required called ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=something-I-threw-in via iframe. I considered modifying ultimatebb.cgi to just throw out some stupid stuff, like so the output works, but it'd probably be much, much better to edit ultimatebb.php, as it does a ton less work (does a couple if statements, and includes an html file). This would probably help with the load.

Thanks guys. If you could help I would really appreciate. My total "users browsing" has gone done dramatically.

Maybe all the bots and crawlers are hitting the index page and the guest number on the forum is almost all gone.

that could be happening, but with use of content islands, the bots should be finding your forum easily.

Allan thanks. But that didn't help at all. I put a js content island for the last registered member. I also copied the js cookie code on the ultimatebb.cgi front forum page and put in the index.

The content island appears but the number of recorded logged-in visitors and guests in the forum didn't improve at all. nothing changed.

I don't know what to do.

a content island for last regged member is a start, but I'm sure you'd get more followers from bots if you added a content island for last 10-20 posts or so, or 10 newest topics, etc... there's many ways you can increase bot follow-through. Be sure you have turned on spider-friendly urls as well.

Bah, Apparently forgot to submit the post I wrote this morning.

Most spiders don't parse javascript, so they never see those links, hence they never get spidered.
PHP or SSI are your best bet

fwiw on my new home page, iwas pleasantly surprised to see the bots crawling the links in an iframe where the src points at my free php script i downloaded from www.rss2html.com

i put that script where ever i found other php stuff in my ubb directories, and it worked like a champ! fast too. and you setup an html template for the output too look however ya like.

so you could set your Content Islands to generate an rss file to do the same kind of thing.

Still no luck.

Anyone able to help?

do you have a link to the page in question? I'm making guesses about what you need