Automatically reload the dashboard when new data is available

[yasoob]

Hi!

I wasn't able to find an option to show currently online users. This can be something like a ping at regular intervals. Is there something like this in goatcounter already?

Thanks!

[arp242]

There isn't a feature for this at the moment, and I wasn't really planning to add it either to be honest. I never quite understood the actual value in it? What is the use case for this?

[yasoob]

There isn't a solid use case to be honest. It's just something I have used in most other analytics apps and I have always enjoyed looking at these stats for my own websites. This is similar to the reason people like me like seeing the "online" people count in a subreddit sidebar. This was the one tiny "major" reason which kept me from using goatcounter for my website.

If you believe this feature won't be useful for general public feel free to close this :)

But if you do decide to work on this please consider making this a configurable public endpoint which can be embedded on the website.

[arp242]

Right; it mostly seems like a "curiosity feature" to me. I'm not principally opposed to adding it, but right now my focus is mostly on building things that really solve problems for people (still plenty of those left!) So I guess this is a "patches welcome" feature for the foreseeable future :-)

[rghedin]

It isn't the most important feature, but a nice to have. There are a few scenarios in which current online users are helpful (for me, at least):

• If the number is below average, it indicates some instability/outage;
• If the number soars, something happened (a viral post? Someone famous linked to my site?); in some cases, this may help to prepare for even more traffic;
• A fiddle, unreliable, although privacy-minded way to see the impact of shared links or new posts published.

[arp242]

I've repurposed this issue to automatically reload the dashboard once new data is available. I had a think about it, and you can get basically the same effect, just with a a 10-second maximum delay. It doesn't require building and adding a whole new UI for it.

[arp242]

Demand for this seems pretty low – it's not super-hard to do this (push out new numbers over the websocket, re-render chart), but to really make it work well does require some effort, and to be honest I don't really think it's worth it both in terms of dev time and complexity of the code-base.

If loads of people had asked for this then things might be different, but it's been over three years and it seems to have very low demand.

For now I'm closing this – can re-consider in the future if it turns out there is a demand for this.