Users table filling up pretty quickly

[AbleMods]

Guys my ac_Users table is filling up pretty quickly.

Looks like you're auto-generating a user account for something, perhaps the customers who checkout without creating an account?

This gonna continue? I've got over 1,500 user records in 72 hours.

[jmestep]

You will get a new user added for each person who comes to the site and probably search engines also--I haven't checked into how AC7 handles them yet, but in 5.5 they tried to assign Search Engines the same UserID so they wouldn't be creating new users all the time. I've got 8 users now in my test site on my dev computer and I'm the only one who has been there. We've got 355,000+ users in the user table in our real site, so you've got some room to expand yet.

[AbleMods]

holy smokes!!

Wait a minute....is that how they're making the shopping cart persistent across browsing sessions?

[jmestep]

Yes. If a customer has cookies turned off, they can still come back and start where they let off. For scalability, it is a good thing that Able does it that way. We have 3 load-balanced web servers and no matter which one the returning browser hits, they still use the same User ID.

[Logan Rhodehamel]

Guys my ac_Users table is filling up pretty quickly.

Looks like you're auto-generating a user account for something, perhaps the customers who checkout without creating an account?

This gonna continue? I've got over 1,500 user records in 72 hours.

If nothing is added to the basket, the user account won't be created. That's intended to prevent accounts being created by search engines that are spidering the shopping pages.

Go to Configure -> Store and look under anonymous user maintenance. You can have these records purged after a certain number of days of inactivity.

Yes, we persist shopping cart data through the database.

[AbleMods]

Excellent information, thank you Logan.

[beveled]

So I'm a novice at creating DB sessions. How do you recognize a user when they have cookies turned off? Is it by IP address hitting the web server? If so, I'm curious how corporate customers with a single proxy server would be treated?

Thanks,

Sheldon

[AbleMods]

So I'm a novice at creating DB sessions. How do you recognize a user when they have cookies turned off? Is it by IP address hitting the web server? If so, I'm curious how corporate customers with a single proxy server would be treated?

In the scenario where cookies are turned off, you can still get a good deal of information from IIS log files.

Corporate customers with proxy server or proxied firewall will hit your server with the same IP. That means certain information will be accurate, like browser type or OS version. Unique Visitors most likely will not, as most log file analyzers track that based on unique IP address.

In the last few years, there has a been a growing trend by banner ad marketers to use cookies for this very reason. Without the cookie, they cannot report their campaign success as accurately and thus charge more or less for the campaign. A secondary reason is the growing trend of "path" marketing - ads pop up on the next site based on the previous sites you've been to that day, week or month. The only way they can accomplish it in this day-and-age is with cookies.

[beveled]

The way I understand it (we're not live yet), the contents of the basket for the last corporate customer will remain in there for the next one.

I would think it would be strange if I were a corporate user, added some items in my basket, and found X more items in there.

Is that the way it works or am I missing something?

Thanks,

Sheldon

[Logan Rhodehamel]

The way I understand it (we're not live yet), the contents of the basket for the last corporate customer will remain in there for the next one.

No, the user session is identified through a cookie. So if the corporate user is not using a shared machine then they will have their own basket.