Posted by jimimou:

....guests???

ok, here's something that ive been wondering about. on the forum index page exists the following:

Currently Active Users: 142
(Most users on site was 554 on 11-21-2008 8:54 PM.)
currently browsing: guests(130)

the bold part is where im focusing my curiosity - are guests uk members? or just plain old passerby's who randomly came across the site and go through the forums and read the stuff we post? if so, perhaps some continue to come back just for the pure enjoyment of reading our silly diatribes on endless trade possibilities and marbury knicknames or the latest exchange btwn some of the dudes that go at it at a regular clip on the site? are they even knicks fans? can we get some more of them to sign up and tell us their stories? i wonder....

what do you think?



[Edited by - jimimou on 03-30-2009 8:44 PM]

Posted by nyk4ever:

Posted by BasketballJones:

Posted by jimimou:

....guests???

ok, here's something that ive been wondering about. on the forum index page exists the following:

Currently Active Users: 142
(Most users on site was 554 on 11-21-2008 8:54 PM.)
currently browsing: guests(130)

the bold part is where im focusing my curiosity - are guests uk members? or just plain old passerby's who randomly came across the site and go through the forums and read the stuff we post? if so, perhaps some continue to come back just for the pure enjoyment of reading our silly diatribes on endless trade possibilities and marbury knicknames or the latest exchange btwn some of the dudes that go at it at a regular clip on the site? are they even knicks fans? can we get some more of them to sign up and tell us their stories? i wonder....

what do you think?



[Edited by - jimimou on 03-30-2009 8:44 PM]

UK over-counts guests. It could have to do with cookies. When I was connecting to download threads for my UK search utility, I noticed that the guest count really spiked (it was higher than 554 - that's not really the highest the count has ever been). I was establishing a new connection for each thread I wanted to download.

It could be that if your browser doesn't accept a UK cookie you'll get counted again on your next visit. Or maybe guests just get counted everytime they visit.

At some point the guests should timeout, but it must be along period of time. So if UK is not recognizing someone who was here just a few minutes ago as a returning guest the guest count will go up, even though it isn't really a new guest coming on.

Do you really have a search utility? I've heard you mention that before and I know you are technically savvy.

Nothing very sophisticated. I just used wget to download the threads, then grepped the resulting text files for the phrases or posters I was after.

I could probably import the threads to a mysql database and do full-text searching, but who cares? I just wanna know when the first mention of "gay robots" on uk occurred.

[Edited by - basketballjones on 03-30-2009 23:51]

Posted by fishmike:

legacy of Nalod... speaking of gay robots where has bonnie been? He was on target for 14,452,960 posts by year end and just dropped off the map. Does somebody have a girlfriend?????

Posted by Cosmic:

Google bots and other info gathering bots sometimes swarm servers at once. From once being a big part of a site there would be times where the Google bot would appear to open as many as 500 connections to the server of which forum software will log as active guests. Since forum software allows sessions to remain open for a period of time beyond the actual active session it would appear that as many as 500 guests are on line but it could be as little as 70 active sessions with the rest yet to time out and be removed from the guest list by the forum software. Usually only a few dozen sessions will be opened by a google bot however there are times when for whatever reason it decides to swarm and just hammer your server. Smaller bandwidth servers can be compromised by it causing a site to run very slow for up to an hour while the bot gathers data.

i can't believe you posted that RIGHT before i was going to!

Posted by Cosmic:

Google bots and other info gathering bots sometimes swarm servers at once. From once being a big part of a site there would be times where the Google bot would appear to open as many as 500 connections to the server of which forum software will log as active guests. Since forum software allows sessions to remain open for a period of time beyond the actual active session it would appear that as many as 500 guests are on line but it could be as little as 70 active sessions with the rest yet to time out and be removed from the guest list by the forum software. Usually only a few dozen sessions will be opened by a google bot however there are times when for whatever reason it decides to swarm and just hammer your server. Smaller bandwidth servers can be compromised by it causing a site to run very slow for up to an hour while the bot gathers data.

i gotta tell ya sebstar's approach to answering the question was more interesting than this.....you all are thinking too rationally...unlike a typical uk poster would!