I apologize in advance if this has been discussed before. But how come of some us show up as being in the forum when logged in and some don't? Case in point: Users Browsing this Forum There are currently 32 users browsing this forum. (6 members & 26 guests) OneLifeToLive BlazersFanatic BlazerWookee Boise Blazer rasheedfan2005 Wizard Mentor
A lot of people just like to read what gets posted here, but haven't signed up for accounts. They show up as guests.
There's an option to show up (or in this case, not show up) as invisible on the forum. It's in the settings... forget where it is, but I have it turned on.
Was wondering if it was something you earned if you reached a certain amount of posts. Wanted to know how many I needed.
Don't get too excited. HCP waters your flowers in the same way a very large dog does. If you don't watch him he'll fertilize your lawn. barfo
Some of the guests you are seeing are actually Google, Google AdSense, Yahoo and Bing search engine spiders.
Denny and I are old friends and he gave me permission to use up to 5 screen names in the same day. You newer posters may not know this.
No they're not. The site detects the search engine spiders and lists them in the global who's online page, but does not count them as online users.
No, what you're seeing are NSA spiders pretending to be search engine spiders. I surprised you were so easily fooled.
Also Paul Allen has a spider in here too. He's making a list of who are the naughty and nice Blazer fans.
That brings up the age-old quandary. Should I kill the spider in her web so that tiny bugs may live? Or should I let spiders live to kill the more numerous, smaller bugs?
In order to show up in the count as member or guest, you have to accept and send vBulletin's tracking cookie, run javascript, etc. These are things the spiders don't do. Our google analytics reports show tens of thousands of unique visitors, and it requires the browser to run JavaScript to collect the data (e.g. no spiders). The # of people online is based upon people who have fetched a page within the last 15 minutes. The number 15 can be changed, but it is the stock vBulletin value, and I see no reason to change it. The reason it's 15 is to allow a person to fetch a page and read it for a while; there's no activity between the user and the server but the user is still "on" the site, no?