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Originally Posted by Civicsman
...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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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It's just a piece of interesting SC trivia.
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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