Anybody Notice?

[LongRanger]

. . . .


993




...........................................

[LongRanger]

4800! . . .


. . . ?



WtF?





..........

[LongRanger]

. . .


1513


I mean --- ~10:1 . . . Visitors vs Members?




...................................

[LongRanger]

. . . a further point of clarification regards your screenshot of the 63 "members" shown . . . of the remainder, I wonder if ALL of them are actually current financial "members" . . . always wondered why there are so many "non member users" on at any time . . .

. . . ?



...............................................

[frederik]

IMO the number of "users" is simply a count of how many recent requests from different IP addresses on the web site there are -- could be the Google bot or any other number of automated services. It doesn't really tell you anything. The number of "members" has nothing to do with paying ESR members. It's the number of people who are currently logged in.

[beh911]

This is my understanding of how the underlying bulletin board system comes up with the counts in your screenshot, Rick.
BTW, this is *not* to be confused with paying members logged in, versus paying members not logged in. Separate discussion....

"Users" - Total number of IP address identified unique sessions with the bulletin board (ESR)

"Members" - A subset of Users. These are sessions against the bulletin board by logged in users (have an authn token / cookie) associated with an active account on the system (e.g. beh911, LongRanger, bobby456, etc)

"Guests" - The rest of the sessions. These could be "members" not logged into the site but accessing the content on the site. The bulletin board will operate in this mode for unauthenticated requests, giving raw data with a reduced large attachment view, such as images, embedded pictures, etc. Think threads stripped of their pictures, polls removed, etc.

Guest mode is also what bots and crawlers, with good intentions (Google search indexing, for example) run as, but can also be nefarious if they are scraping personal information out of threads. Bots exist that scan for phone numbers, email addresses, etc and harvest them for the spam campaigns their owners run

Hope that makes sense

[HughH]

and members are not always "members with good intentions" If you click onto their member ID you can see a great many of them seem to be bots that have been given a logon and some (i counted 3 in the ones that were on before) show "banned" against their ID which I think means bots that have been identified as spammers and "banned"