Anonymous User swarm

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deverill
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Anonymous User swarm

Post by deverill » Fri Dec 02, 2016 6:57 am

Hi everyone.

I have a store that all users must log into in order to sell anything. It is for people like hotel concierges that sell to the hotel guests. Since everyone that uses the store logs in I expected there to be only a limited number of users in the store.

When I look at the list of "real" users I see 3873 records which seems about right. When I check "Include Anonymous Users" I get 28,105. We have the store set to delete anonymous occasionally but my question is how do these anonymous users get created when the sales people all log in?

If I had to guess I'd say that every time a new basket is created it is created as an anonymous user but why would it do that when the user/"customer" is logged in to a real account?

Thanks,
Jim
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Re: Anonymous User swarm

Post by jmestep » Mon Dec 05, 2016 12:23 am

They would get created whenever anyone or a search engine access one page in your website, logged in or not. For example, someone going to your home page or even your login page.
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Re: Anonymous User swarm

Post by AbleMods » Mon Dec 05, 2016 3:16 am

Exactly Judy.

Any bot or crawler hitting the login page will still create an anonymous user record for that first hit. Whether they eventually log in or not, the initial hit to the home page/login page will create an anonymous user. And don't forget, a lot of devices (and some browsers) do background page refreshes. So even if someone has the login page open in a different tab it can still get a hit.

When a new anonymous user is created, a new basket for that user is also created.

You can reduce the anonymous count by simply lowering the days to keep anonymous users in the maintenance settings. You don't any of them, so set it to 1 day.
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deverill
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Re: Anonymous User swarm

Post by deverill » Mon Dec 05, 2016 6:20 am

Thank you Judy and Joe. That makes sense and Joe's right, we don't do anything with them so we will probably drop it to 1.

I appreciate the answers!
Jim
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