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Forum Stats Widget for Flarum 2.0

A compact widget that displays online users, forum statistics (discussions, posts, users), and the latest registration — with configurable layout options for both desktop and mobile.

Screenshots

Features

• Online Users — Shows avatars of currently online users, sorted by most recently active. The list is internally capped at 500 — high enough that real-world forums never hit it; if they do, the overflow renders as a "+N more" indicator. Users who have hidden their online status are shown as a separate "hidden" count with a dashed circle.
• Online Guests — Optional approximate count of unauthenticated visitors browsing the forum, shown as a separate row with a dotted circle below the hidden users. Each guest tab pings a small endpoint that records a hash of the visitor's IP and User-Agent into a short-lived presence map; the displayed count is the number of unique fingerprints seen within the "last seen interval". Counting is approximate by design — visitors behind a shared NAT collapse into one, mobile users on rotating IPs may be over-counted — and no persistent identifier is stored on the visitor's browser. The endpoint is rate-limited per IP, the in-memory map is hard-capped (oldest evicted on overflow), and the count can optionally be merged into the bar's main "online" number.
• Forum Statistics — Displays discussion count, post count, and total user count with plural-aware labels.
• Latest Registration — Shows the most recently registered user with their avatar and display name.
• Expandable Panel — Compact stats bar with a click-to-expand panel for detailed information.
• Live Updates — Widget data auto-refreshes when you navigate back to the forum index (SPA navigation) or bring the browser tab back to the foreground. Combined with event-driven server cache invalidation on discussion / post / user events, stats stay fresh on every page return without a full reload. Desktop and mobile widget instances share one in-flight request, and actors without widget permissions skip the refetch entirely.
• Presence Heartbeat — Logged-in users with a focused tab send a small background ping every minute so the online indicator stays accurate even while they read or compose a long reply via the realtime extension without navigating. On the forum index the same ping doubles as a widget refresh (sparse fields, ~500 bytes per ping), so the online users list and stats keep themselves current — near-realtime, no navigation needed. Off the index it's a 92-byte sparse ping. Throttled to one DB write per 3 minutes per user, skipped when the tab is hidden or the user is a guest, and disable-able from admin.
• Configurable Layout — Choose between a classic sidebar widget or a full-width bar above the discussion list. Full-width mode supports positioning above, inside, or below the toolbar on desktop.
• Separate Desktop/Mobile Settings — Independent bar position settings for desktop and mobile views.
• Stat Toggles — Each statistic (discussions, posts, users, latest registration) can be individually enabled or disabled from the admin panel.
• Two-Tier Caching — Separate caches for privileged users (admins/mods who can see hidden users) and regular users — same display cap, different result sets. Zero database queries on cache hit.
• Event-Driven Cache Invalidation — Caches are automatically flushed when discussions, posts, or users are created or deleted.
• Granular Permissions — Each stat (online users, discussions, posts, users, latest registration) can be independently permission-gated. All default to visible for guests.
• Accessible — ARIA labels and roles throughout, screen-reader-friendly counts (e.g. the guest badge announces as "12,345 guests" rather than relying on the visual dotted-vs-dashed distinction), section headings exposed via role="heading" for H-key navigation, full keyboard support (Tab to the toggle, Enter to expand, Tab through the panel, Escape to close and return focus to the toggle), and elastic count badges that gracefully degrade to a pill shape for large numbers without overflowing.
• Fully Localizable — Every user-facing string flows through locale keys with ICU plural support; no hardcoded English. Translators can add a language by dropping a YAML file alongside locale/en.yml.

Requirements

• Flarum 2.0 (not compatible with Flarum 1.x)
• PHP 8.2+

Installation

Then enable the extension in the admin panel under Extensions > Forum Stats Widget.

Note: Since Flarum 2.0 beta 8 (Laravel 13 upgrade), php flarum assets:publish is required after every composer require / composer update of any extension. Skipping it leaves stale compiled assets and can break the forum until the published assets match the running code.

Configuration

Admin Settings

Permissions

All permissions default to Everyone (including guests):

• View online users — See the online users list and count. Also gates the online guests row when guest counting is enabled.
• View discussions count — See the discussions statistic
• View posts count — See the posts statistic
• View users count — See the users statistic
• View latest registration — See the latest registered user

Caching

The extension maintains two separate online user caches:

1. Privileged cache — For users with the "Always view user last seen time" permission (typically admins and moderators). Includes users who have hidden their online status.
2. Regular cache — For all other users. Hidden users are excluded and shown only as a count.

Both caches share a hardcoded ceiling of 500 entries — well above what any real forum sees concurrently. Beyond that the panel falls back to a "+N more" overflow row.

Both caches default to a 30-second TTL. The forum statistics cache (discussions, posts, users, latest registration) has a separate 600-second TTL and is automatically invalidated when content is created or deleted.

Updating

Then hard-refresh the forum in your browser (Cmd+Shift+R on macOS, Ctrl+Shift+R on Windows/Linux) so it picks up the new CSS/JS.

assets:publish is required on Flarum 2.0 beta 8 and later — without it, the compiled CSS/JS on disk can fall out of sync with the running PHP and the forum may fail to render.

If the new version still doesn't appear:

• Confirm the new version is installed: composer show ekumanov/flarum-ext-forum-widgets | grep versions
• Check the served cache-buster hash changed: curl -s https://your-forum/ | grep -oE 'forum\.css\?v=[a-f0-9]+' — the hash should differ from before the update.
• If you're behind a CDN (e.g. Cloudflare) and the hash changed but you still see old bytes, purge that URL in your CDN.

Links

• Packagist
• Discuss
• Report Issues

License

MIT