Guests

[CaleyMad]

Why is there 550 guests on this site and only 39 members online. Its not like theres anything exciting happening on here.

Has somebody posted a CTO link anywhere on a popular site re-routing people here :)

[tm4tj]

I too have noticed this on occasion. The online list will be full of guests sometimes.

I will move this to the techy threads and see if Don/Scotty can provide the answer.

[ICTFCkev]

361 user(s) active in the past 60 minutes

316 guests, 45 members, 0 anonymous members

:D

[WYNESS101]

anonymous members :D

Edited September 20, 2009 by WYNESS101

[ICTFCkev]

Members with no names.. Spooky feckers so they are.

Feb8th will tell ya bout them. :D

[CaleyD]

The internet is patrolled by Bots and Spiders.

Some of these are perfectly harmless.....such as the Google ones which collect information for search engine population.....and some are malicious (we block those)

As the list shows all "User" activity for the last hour and because these bots will try pages several times a minute and dozens/hundreds of pages per visit then one bot can quickly ramp up the figures you are seeing.

The current search bot that is looking at the site seems to originate from Majestic 12 which is some kind of Community Driven Search Engine Project.

We allow some of these bots certain access (Google, Yahoo, MSN) and the rest only get to see the site at "Guest" level....it's the ones operating at Guest level which impact the Guest User numbers. Because we allow the "big" ones certain access we can easily identify them and the software simply doesn't bother showing their visit statisitcs (to you guys at least, Scotty and I can still see it if we so desire).

In short......nothing to be concerned about.

[Georgeios]

Just then i noticed that we had about 21 Guests reading Wilson: Bring back Robbo, i wonder it thats the morton fans doing a wee mission to probe our forums lol

[CaleyMad]

310 guests, 20 members, 0 anonymous members

Is that anything to do with the site not working earlier?

[CaleyD]

Did you actually read the explanation I gave above about the "Guests" thing?

[TSTtiger]

just out if interest, what exactly are bots and spiders and what do they do ? whats the difference between the malicious ones and the harmless ones?

i feel a whoosh coming :022:

[CaleyMad]

http://www.ahfx.net/weblog/39

[TSTtiger]

cheers ^