Through Live Stats, you can view just about every type of statistics you want to see - or those statistics are within the reach of just one click. But in the case of JoomlaWatch functions like History - where the information is shared with Live Stats - you can still get a more comprehensive look at the traffic statistics you want to view.

While History won"t offer you novel functions or specific drop-down menus, you will see a list of previous visits that is easy to read and easy to click through. To wit, here is a screenshot from a recent view of our own History section: As you can see, much of the information is nothing you haven"t seen in Live Stats.

But that doesn"t mean History is without its own unique features and settings. Let"s explore those settings right now. What Are You Seeing? In History, you"re taking a look at all of the most recent visits, sorted by the individual user. The top users are the most recent visitors, and older visitors are placed directly below them. As you can see, some users visit a multitude of pages while others simply view just one or two.

Although we did cover this information in the Live Stats tutorial, the information here is so valuable that it can be worth a refresher. On the left, you"ll see the IP address of the most recent users. Immediately to the right of that, you"ll see the logo for the browser they"re using - a majority of the users in the screenshot above are using Windows 7 by Microsoft.

Immediate Features You Can Use in "History" As is the case in the Live Stats feature, hovering over the entry for an individual visit with your mouse will yield you this window: From that window, you"ll have a number of options. For example, you can block a specific IP address from using your site. Or you can use the page that that particular user visited as a new goal for you to measure. You can also look at the various URL parameters and add those as goals to be tracked specifically, as well.

Even though you can see a lot of these statistics in "Live View," it"s worth taking a trip to "History" every once in a while to view the list of previous visits exclusively.

Configurations and Settings Click over to "Settings," which you can see among the JoomlaWatch features that are always on top: From settings, you can then use the individual menu to visit the History & Performance settings: As you can see, there are a number of options that allow you to configure and customize what you"re seeing on the History page.

For example, you can choose how often to refresh the time stats - but be careful not to make it refresh too often; this can make load times a little more difficult and slow.

You can also change how long you want to keep History data, but again, be warned that you don"t want to hold onto too much data or else the page will simply take a long time to load. Remember that History does function more like a "Live Stats" component.

Other Configurations and Settings Let"s take a look at some of the individual configurations you can make to history: - History Max records : As stated, you don"t want this number to be too high because then you"ll be tracking a lot of user data and it can make things on JoomlaWatch run a little more slowly. Keep this number moderate or even low to ensure that things are running smoothly.

Update Time Visits : This allows you to set the time after which your visitors" stats will be refreshed. Generally it"s best to keep this to a default. Don"t be afraid to experiment or tweak it to your liking, but keep in mind that a refresh time that is too fast can be obtrusive. Stats max rows : It"s great to have expanded statistics when you"re in expanded mode, but you don"t want too many, otherwise the information will become nonsensical. It"s good to keep this number a little lower to ensure that your History is easy to browse through.

Specific Uses of "History" What"s a great use of these configurations? If you are tracking certain visits or visitors and you can"t find those visits in the Live Stats feature because of new stats pushing them to the bottom, then you can simply click over to History and continue to track those unique visits and visitors.

You can also use the specific functions of History to view more and learn more about that user"s behavior. Essentially, you have all of the same functionality in History as you do in Live Stats. But because History does allow you to have some flexibility with how you view these live stats, it can be a great additional tool to use for very specific purposes. JoomlaWatch Anti-spam and Blocking One of the most important functionalities in all of JoomlaWatch"s capabilities is reducing and even eliminating spam.

After all, if you have a lot of traffic to monitor, it only logically follows that your site will be the target of spammers and Internet hucksters alike. In JoomlaWatch today, the Anti-Spam report might look different to what you"ve seen in the past, but it comes with great capabilities. You"ll be able to define the most common spam words you receive and add them to your Anti-Spam settings so that you can customize your own anti-spam strategy. Let"s take a closer look at the anti-spam features you can find as part of JoomlaWatch.

The Anti-Spam Dashboard Click over to Anti-Spam under your JoomlaWatch menu options and you"ll see a dashboard that looks quite similar to this: Of course, if you"re new to JoomlaWatch, much of the information you see above won"t be filled in - but don"t worry; that"s what we"re going to be helping you with.

Those rows show the IP addresses that have been blocked (these are grouped by dates), the amount of hits that IP address created, the "bad word" that caused the block in the first place (more on this later), and the reason that the block took place. The fifth row allows you to unblock any innocent bystanders that might have been unnecessarily wrist-slapped by the JoomlaWatch Anti-Spam function.

As you can see, sometimes users don"t deserve to be blocked. Also, note that the user"s flag shows you which country they"re from.) The word "C alis" is blocked for obvious reasons, but because a user typed in "specialists," into a search form on our site, which contains the word C alis, they were blocked.

An unblock can then be issued to serve justice. The Right Side Where do these "bad words" come from? You can designate them yourself. That"s what happens under Anti-Spam Settings on the right side of the Anti-Spam page. Let"s zoom in on it: The first option, on top, allows you to enable or disable the ban you have on each of the words. This allows you to keep the Spam Words List below in tact while still removing the Anti-Spam settings.

This is great if you want to turn off your spam settings without losing all of the words you"ve added over time. Keep this option clicked, of course, if you want your strict Anti-Spam policy in place. Keeping this box clicked will mean that anyone caught using those spam words on your site will be blocked and put on the list on the left.

Under that, you can enter in the individual words you want to be on the "bad word" list. Some obvious bad words like certain products should be a part of this list, but generally you want to use any words that you notice spammers are using on your site in particular.

By the way, if you want to change these words and ensure that they"re integrated into your anti-spam system, you"ll want to click the "save" button below the list of words. It looks like this: One quick note about selecting your words: you"ll want to be careful about them because you want to avoid false blockings, as we saw in the "Cialis" example above. It"s not too difficult to install this module so that it"s placed every time, but it should be somewhere on the left side of your site.

This will help ensure that the page isn"t loaded after an attempt to spam your site. Conclusion Using the Anti-Spam feature should not just be about the reports. In JoomlaWatch, you"ll have a lot of options to customize how you fight spammers. You"ll want to customize your own "bad" words that are banned from users entering on your site, of course, but you"ll also want to routinely pluck out the bad words that are banning innocent users.

Additionally, you"ll want to use the Anti-Spam JoomlaWatch section to unblock users that have been unfairly classified as spammers, as we saw in our specific example. That"s why it"s a good idea to routinely check the left-hand side of the Anti-Spam page and view "Reason" that an IP has been blocked. If some users are being banned unfairly, you"ll likely see entries like this: Of course, sometimes larger words will contain smaller words and it will still be spam.

That"s what you"ll get in the case of email reports, a fully customizable feature of JoomlaWatch that you"ll want to configure to your own settings and likings. Let"s take a look at this configurations and features so you can customize your own email reporting experience with JoomlaWatch.

Overview Open up "Emails" under the top bar or go to Components - JoomlaWatch - Email Reports to bring up the same page we"ll be dealing with here. You should see a table that looks a little something like this: This is the top of the Email Reports page, and as you can see, a lot of configurations and settings are built right in. As you can see here, we have ours enabled, but if you don"t want to receive reports that often, you can simply leave this box unchecked.

Below that option, you can fill in the email address at which you want to receive these reports - nothing out-of-the-ordinary to report here. Next, you see the EMAIL NAME TRUNCATE option. This is simply an option that allows you to change the maximum characters of the email row name; this comes in handy if your individual email program has limited options and you need to configure the email itself.

Email Value Filters The next section of settings and features allows you to change the values of reports in the email itself. Essentially, you are whittling down the information you receive in each email report by telling Email Reports when to exclude certain information.

Let"s take a look: In each function, you"re entering in the value (generally a percentage, though you don"t want to include the actual percentage sign) that configures the rows and traffic reports you"ll see in the email. As you can see, the page "user register" was the most popular page of the day for the current report.

Not only is the value of how many times the page was hit displayed, but the overall percentage of how valuable this page to your website is located immediately to the right. This is similar for "Referers" and "Keyphrases" as well - all of the numbers you"re looking at essentially mean the same thing.

It"s important to note right now that these variables will look different as you edit your email report settings, which we discussed earlier. You can exclude certain pages from these reports if you don"t need to review their information on a regular basis. Let"s continue exploring.

As you can see, the variables that are measured in the daily report strongly correspond to the variables you can check on your own, such as in the Graphs and Trends function of JoomlaWatch.

Viewing this generated report at Email Reports is actually a good way to get a daily summary of the traffic you received if you don"t actually want to receive nightly emails. There are more variables that are measured here too, including Users, Browsers, and Operating Systems.

But since you probably get the gist of what Email Report numbers are all about, we didn"t include those in the screenshots. Conclusion Configuring your email report options is a pretty straightforward process. How your email reports ultimately end up looking is up to you and your preferences; if you want to see a total range of everything going on your site, you can configure each variable to include up to 100 percent. But it will bring you a lot of information quickly, which is one of the major goals of JoomlaWatch in the first place.

Logging into this section, your primary goal is simply to retract this information. Although JoomlaWatch does present it to you clearly and easily, it will help if you know your way around the feature for the next time you decide to review your Modules Components sizes. Here"s a brief guide to doing just that. Bringing Up the Site By now, you might be well experienced at navigating around JoomlaWatch.

But for beginners, it"s worth briefly explaining how to find the Modules Component Sizes feature. First, you can bring it down in the Joomla Menu under Components - JoomlaWatch - Modules Component Sizes. You can also find it simply by clicking "Components" on the top row of your regular JoomlaWatch pages: Either navigation path will bring up the same page, Modules Component Sizes.

Overview Let"s log in to JoomlaWatch and find Modules Component Sizes. You"ll find the page looking quite similar to ours here: The first thing that"s obvious is that there are two tables - the left and right-hand side. One table (the left) is for components, while the other table (the right) is for modules. If you"re noticing how only some of the size information is showing up at this point, don"t worry - we"ll get to that).

Each component and module is divided by alphabetical order and not by size, so be sure to keep that information handy when you"re looking to measure an individual module ore component. But before we get to the meat of the issue, let"s explore what you"ll see up top. Alerts Above the left-hand table, you"ll see a couple of alerts: The first alert is when the last check was performed.

Why do you see this under Module Component Sizes but not anywhere else? It"s because you"ll actually be refreshing the information when you open this page - but we"ll get to that in a moment. The next alert tells you that blue modules and components (that is, modules and components listed in the tables below) are ones that are located in the administrator directory. This should help you easily browse through the information if that"s exactly what you"re looking for.

If not, feel free to ignore the "blue" font on the modules and components as you browse. Using and Reviewing the Tables A simple perusal of the tables in Module Component Sizes will show you three columns: These columns are fairly easy to understand. You"ll see the component name (organized alphabetically), the component size, and then an icon that symbolizes "refresh."

If you don"t see any "size" information for either your components or modules, don"t worry. You"ll simply have to click "refresh" to get the latest information as to the size of these components and modules. Of course, if you"re confused by the triple refresh icon vs. The triple refresh icon will refresh the information of all the rows in the table.

Clicking the refresh icon in the row next to the component or module you want to look up will simply bring up the information for that single row. In that case, you might have information that looks more like this: Why the need for both a "Refresh all" and a "Refresh" icon? It"s because of the nature of the Component Module page itself.