Where do all these guest users come from?

Mark:

It’s interesting that so many more guests were visiting at 0200 mountain time than at 1000. Do we infer that there’s a lot of early (0800-0900) visitors in Europe?

FWIW, I keep a browser page open to the WE forum almost all the time, although I might actually check it for activity only 2 to 3 times per day. Wonder if that’s true for others??

Are “Guests Online” only those visiting the forum, or does it include general browsing?

Should I be feeling guilty? Does it put a load on your server when I’m not active??

Tom, some time ago we had a discussion about this, but as is more often the case, I cannot find that thread back.

Back then the amount of visitors seemed very high. So we were wondering where they were coming from. Were there really so many “lurkers”, was Google sending out search bots or were the Chinese trying to hack the site? But in the end nobody knew the answer.

Right now it’s 08:45 where I live (UTC +1) and there are 878 guests online. Europe is starting to go to work, but most of the USA should be asleep. While the WEPS may be popular in Europe, I really doubt so many people from Europe (and other places in the world) are currently watching the WE forum. So… I don’t know how the site arrives at these numbers.

Mark: I think you might have been onto something with the “Google search bot” idea. There are maybe thousands of search engines out there which routinely (as in every night) go out and take snapshots of pertinent web sites. I read once that they were called “crawlers” as in crawling through all the pages to glean data. To reduce the bandwidth loading, I think they’d do most of it overnight. Maybe there’s somebody smarter (as in younger) here to fill us in.

Twenty years ago, I subscribed to a service which did automatic monitoring of data for you. I gave them a set of search criteria and every week or so I’d get a report. For me, it was patent and intellectual property data. The service was a commercial spinoff of NASA. I dropped it when I finally got internet access. Until Google took off, I used one called “Dog Pile” and guess what? They’re still out there. They copy all new pages to a reference file, then search it when you ask for a search. They don’t actually go out and look at every page out there when you ask for it. It’s still friggin’ amazing.

I think that if you leave the browser open, even if you close a specific tab, your session stays active. I know it works that way for me on other sites i.e. if I have a browser open, open a new tab to visit a site and login, then close that tab later, I’m still logged in when I open a tab and visit the site again, provided I didn’t close all the tabs in the browser.