How do I count unique visitors to my site?

Question

I am making a visitor counting system for user posts to show the most viewed posts on homepage. I have a visitor counting system now but all it registers a view at every pag

Answer 1

I have edited the "Best answer" code, though I found a useful thing that was missing. This is will also track the ip of a user if they are using a Proxy or simply if the server has nginx installed as a proxy reverser.

I added this code to his script at the top of the function:

function getRealIpAddr()
{
    if (!empty($_SERVER['HTTP_CLIENT_IP']))   //check ip from share internet
    {
      $ip=$_SERVER['HTTP_CLIENT_IP'];
    }
    elseif (!empty($_SERVER['HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR']))   //to check ip is pass from proxy
    {
      $ip=$_SERVER['HTTP_X_FORWARDED_FOR'];
    }
    else
    {
      $ip=$_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'];
    }
    return $ip;
}
$adresseip = getRealIpAddr();

Afther that I edited his code.

Find the line that says the following:

// get the user name if it is logged, or the visitors IP (and add the identifier)

    $uvon = isset($_SESSION['nume']) ? $_SESSION['nume'] : $_SERVER['SERVER_ADDR']. $vst_id;

and replace it with this:

$uvon = isset($_SESSION['nume']) ? $_SESSION['nume'] : $adresseip. $vst_id;

This will work.

Here is the full code if anything happens:

0) {
        for($i=0; $i<$nrrows; $i++) {
          // get each line and separate the user /visitor and the timestamp
          $ar_line = explode($sep, $ar_rows[$i]);
      // add in $addrow array the records in last $timeon seconds
          if($ar_line[0]!=$uvon && (intval($ar_line[1])+$timeon)>=time()) {
            $addrow[] = $ar_rows[$i];
          }
        }
      }
    }

$nruvon = count($addrow);                   // total online
$usron = '';                                    // to store the name of logged users
// traverse $addrow to get the number of visitors and users
for($i=0; $i<$nruvon; $i++) {
 if(preg_match($rgxvst, $addrow[$i])) $nrvst++;       // increment the visitors
 else {
   // gets and stores the user's name
   $ar_usron = explode($sep, $addrow[$i]);
   $usron .= '
 - '. $ar_usron[0]. '';
 }
}
$nrusr = $nruvon - $nrvst;              // gets the users (total - visitors)

// the HTML code with data to be displayed
$reout = '
Online: '. $nruvon. '
Visitors: '. $nrvst. '
Users: '. $nrusr. $usron. '
';

// write data in $filetxt
if(!file_put_contents($filetxt, implode("\n", $addrow))) $reout = 'Error: Recording file not exists, or is not writable';

// if access from