Where do all these guest users come from?

[Mark76]

I moved the posts on this from another thread here.

— Mark

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Tom, the amount of “lurkers” is much larger than the number of active forum members. Your words are read by a large number of people :cheer: .

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Molecule Polishing: my blog about sharpening with the Wicked Edge

[tcmeyer]

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?

[Mikedoh]

I pretty much keep a browser open also.

[Mark76]

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.

Incidentally, according to the site the Curry family (both Gib and Cliff) are watching the forum right know. In case you read this, guys, could you let us know whether you are really reading the forum right now?

Molecule Polishing: my blog about sharpening with the Wicked Edge

[wickededge]

I’m guilty of often leaving the browser window open.

-Clay

[tcmeyer]

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

[Mark76]

😀

One of the reasons it’s such a mystery how the server arrives at the user count is that it is pretty hard to measure the number of “active” users. What is active? In the old days, just a couple of years ago, the only thing a server could know was when you fetched a page from it (i.e., loaded it into your web browser). That’s it. The server didn’t know whether you were reading that page a couple of minutes later or even a couple of hours later. Or whether you had closed it already.

Nowadays web servers can monitor your behavior better by employing techniques like Javascript, Flash or simply automatic page reloads. But I think this forum software doesn’t use those advanced techniques. So the only way I can think of how this server arrives at the user count is by displaying how many users have loaded a page from it in, say, the last half hour. But that doesn’t mean they are active. And they don’t put a load on the server.

Molecule Polishing: my blog about sharpening with the Wicked Edge

[tcmeyer]

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.

[Gib Curry]

Oh, yeah, I leave a browser tab open on Wicked Edge at times, too.

I’ve also noticed that sometimes I can close the page and when I come back, it shows to me that I had never actually or technically logged off. I think the server would be listing me as “on” when I wasn’t. But, technologically, the connection would have remained open.

~~~~
For Now,

Gib

Φ

"Everyday edge for the bevel headed"

"Things work out best for those who make the best out of the way things work out."

[wickededge]

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.

-Clay

[Mark76]

I moved the posts on this from another thread here.

— Mark

Molecule Polishing: my blog about sharpening with the Wicked Edge

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