Segway Chat Becomes REAL Popular
 

This is copied from bottom of the main Segway Chat page.

"Most users ever online was 1,149, 07-04-2009 at 03:43 AM".

As the owner of a home improvement forum and the staff member of other types of forums, I can tell you that number is not all real people. Some are bots from search engines (believe it or not, there are actually hundreds of different search engines besides Google, Yahoo, Bing and the other standard fare) and some from spammers or email harvesters originating in countries like China, Russia, Philippines, Vietnam, the Koreas, India, and many, many others. I usually clear my visitor cache about once a year so that the number reflects a closer to realistic count based on the updates to my server's security measures to keep unwanted bots and spammers out.

Forum software also has a setting that can affect that number by increasing or decreasing the number of seconds or minutes before the session times out for each visitor. The longer the time, the larger the count. For instance, if it is set to timeout after 30 minutes, then an individual visitor will register as being online, even up to almost 30 minutes after they left. If you get an average of one new visitor per minute and the average stay is only 4 minutes, you could show as many as 34 people online when you actually only have 4 at that moment. If the timeout is set to 60 and everything else is the same, it could show as many as 64 visitors online, when you only have 4.

The main use of the "most users online" feature is attracting members. No one likes a dead forum. A visitor is more likely to stick around to check things out if it appears to be a popular forum.

Regardless, SegwayChat.com is the best forum of its type that I am aware of. Those 1,149 users may not all have been real people and they may not have all been online at the same moment, you won't find a Segway oriented forum with better or more accurate information.

R'gards,

Jim

I agree with the above, and pretty much the remainder of the post, as well. However, it's difficult to imaging how 1,149 people, bots, or etc. would be legitimately tallied at one time, even during a period of an hour or two. Once a bot is querying the site, one would presume that the timer starts counting and the bot doesn't change it's IP address. To get legitimately to 1,149, a bunch of people and/or bots would have to hit the site pretty much simultaneously.

It's just a piece of interesting SC trivia.

What is the home time zone for the forum? Wouldn't the time of 3:43 AM be significant if we are considering live persons or automated entities?

I believe that July 4th in 2009 was a Saturday. If the home time zone is in the continental United States (Eastern time thru Pacific) then much of Europe would have been 7 to 10 hours later, and therefore during the day, instead of the wee hours of the morning. If the home zone is elsewhere, like GMT, then it is possible that the primary likely awake time for live persons may be somewhere else on the planet.

Also, I am not sure, but MAMS is frequently near that date, and in 2009 may have been, or may have been imminent. If that is the case, there may have been mega hits looking for info on an event about to happen.

I don't have any real data to support my opinion that it is rather unlikely that you would have that many live hits at 3:43 in the morning from live persons, if that is their local time, yet I feel confident it is true just the same.

I hope you aren't implying anything illegitimate could have caused that statistic. It would take somewhat of a database wizard to have created that number - or maybe the administration increased the timeout setting to 24 hours (it's not unfathomable that segwaychat.com would get 1,200 or so visitors a day). But I believe it is as I stated.

I don't know what the timeout setting is, but I keep my own forum at an hour. In 2007, I had a reading of over 1,000 visitors, which is pretty unusual for a niche forum that's only about a year old. It happens every day in the forum world. The software cannot differentiate between a human and a bot. It does not check IP addresses to see where they come from.

The number is legitimate. Please don't doubt that. The administration of this site is above any kind of nonsense that involves padding the numbers. And as I explained, it is not simultaneous. It is over a period of the timeout setting for this site. Could be an hour or more or less, but it's a legitimate number. It counts the number of unique IP addresses online at any particular moment. Whether it is a bot, spider or human, it is still a "user." Bots and spiders, even originating from, the same domain, can use any number of unique IP addresses. I have counted over 20 spiders online from bing.com. Google can send out dozens - and even more if the site uses Adsense ads. I've caught 9 spam bots from Russia all online at the same time, each using a different IP.

Spam is a multi-billion dollar industry and spammers attack forums and blogs trying to drop automated spam millions of times every day. The forum software used here is very secure, or it would be a full-time job for someone just to delete the spam posts and ban the spam registrations.

It's not really trivia. It's a fact of forum administration. Most forum members are clueless about the kind of work involved in running a successful forum - and a popular forum is many more times that much work. I managed a popular hunting forum until a few months ago. I had to quit because it was so much work that I didn't have time to glide (or manage my own websites).

Jim

I don't doubt the veracity of the above posting. I just find some of it very entertaining as well.

I would just add that providing the measurement technique hasn't changed, then that figure, however it is contructed, is still useful to compare against how many people are curently logged on at any one time. E.g., right now there are 8 members and 41 guests online. One therefore assumes there was something interesting happening on 07-04-2009 at 08:43 AM. Perhaps we should compare the number of users online at the same time on the same date each month to analyse any trends - or just before and after that time... no, maybe not.

The OP indicated 3:43 AM, and you posted 8:43 AM. Does this mean that the time is indicated to the user in their local time zone? Is this the exact same moment, as reported from two time zones 5 hours apart or is it two different times? (or a mere typo?)

The forum software translates the time based on your time zone settings in your profile. I did a copy and paste. That is how it appears to me.

Of course I wasn't suggesting any illegitimate actions on the part of SC admin, although I wonder how you "know" that site admin is above padding, etc. The site has no advertising and pumping up the visitor numbers therefore has no value.

I agree with gbrandwood that "8 members and 41 guests" is a reasonable value, and is fairly typical of what I see when I happen to notice the "who is online now" numbers (although the "41" is higher than I would expect to see). However, 1,149 is really high. Either a LOT of bots/spiders/whatever hit the site within a short period of time (an hour, say), or the timeout is set high, or the software can't discriminate multiple "hits" from one user or something like this. To suggest that over 1,000 unique individuals visited SC within one hour, in June 2009 is ...um... not likely.

Oh, and if this topic (for SC, in particular) isn't trivia, "trifling things or details, especially obscure and useless knowledge", then I don't know what else might qualify.