At the top of the main forum page this afternoon:

Legion World Recent Visitors: 100

rokk steady, Reep, Greybird, Thriftshop Debutante, Danny Blaine, Eryk Davis Ester, the boy with UltraPowers, Lightning Lad, Nightcrawler, Caleb, and 90 guest(s)

NINETY guests? How are we getting so many visitors that simply don't choose to join? Is this software counting distinct Internet addresses? Does it compare them to the last logged addresses of registered members? Could some of us members end up being counted twice?

Inquiring minds ... well, are merely morbidly curious.

And is this -- as I thought I'd read elsewhere in the UBB help files or some such query here -- a site-traffic count over just the previous half hour?

I believe it is for just the past half-an-hour as that is when the cache clears out members who have logged out.

Also, the record for visitors, set on July 17, is 120. This is counting unique IP addresses. And before you ask, if a member has more than one IP address, it is listed on his or her membership and will not count as a ghost or guest visitor. We can actually tell who has multiple accounts by their IP address.

[Edit: Forgot to add this. If you are not signed in it will register you as a visitor even though you may be on the same IP address as your account. You will not be shown as on-line unless you actually sign in. Although we can pull up a limited number of the most recent guests with their IP addresses and compare them. Should we want to go through all that work.]

I think as I understand it (and that doesn't mean much), that everytime you log on or refresh, it displays the number of members and the number of visiters based on hits from distinct IP addresses in the past half an hour.

Maybe some people log out and check the page regularly? I don't know. Or we could just be a popular stop for lurkers.

Damn it! Even when I 'BAMF!' here Scott beats me.

The guy is everywhere!

I try.

And I found it funny you said distinct IP addresses. That's what I originally said but when I edited myself I changed it to unique.

{ I believe it is for just the past half-an-hour as that is when the cache clears out members who have logged out. }

Well, then, one helluva lotta people must be trying, but not buying, so to speak. I have to wonder where they're coming from. And I hope we're not scaring them off! {g}

It's not that this site's existence has been constantly plastered in Legion venues. Frequently, yes, but far from constantly, and certainly not from what traffic I've seen in Yahoo! Groups.

{[...] if a member has more than one IP address, it is listed on his or her membership and will not count as a ghost or guest visitor. We can actually tell who has multiple accounts by their IP address. }

Multiple user IDs, you mean? For most of us, I tend to doubt it. I may have missed a detail, but I thought that each modem at each dial-up point has its own IP address. We non-broadband users aren't sitting at one fixed Net tap, 24/7.

If each unique IP address is listed, my list must be among those that's a mile long. I have to shift, at times, among four different local (and flaky) dial-up access numbers for EarthLink. And I'll bet, by now, I've used at least 20 different modems at each one. That in itself would be eighty IP addresses!

One possibility that came to my mind was that some of those guests are non-human Web "spiders" indexing this site for the search engines. Some almost certainly are. Nothing, though, shows up yet in Google for this site's domain name, after nearly three weeks. So it's taking a while.

Hmmm...I'm not even going to pretend that I know anything about this sort of stuff.

But, I will say that back on the 15th of July I was recreating a thread from the old DCMBs of which you (Greybird), Scott, and I were the only posters. Since I needed one, I picked an IP address from a then recent post of yours, Grey. And just now I checked your IP for the above post and the first two numbers were the same the last two were not. I don't know what it means, but I just thought I'd throw it out there.

I'm not completely surprised to see a large number of guests. I think that there are prbably a lot of peple who prefer to lurk, rather than interact. I think I lurked on the DC Boards for nearly a year before I finally broke down and registered.

Yah, I think I was a two-year off&on lurker before I registered. I felt like I knew many of you by the time I signed up: how creepy for you is that? LOL

Okay, Mr. Robin Williams in "One Hour Photo!"

(I haven't seen that, BTW. Is it good?)

what's wrong with creepy?

VVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVVv

Well, I said it would take some work if we wanted to do it but there is a handy feature we benefactors can use to see the IP address of each and every post made by every member. And simply comparing those (a lot will be identical in the first two sets of digits on some ISP's) will tell you if you got a multiple ID'er. Not that I'd do that. You can have as many ID's as you want as long as you aren't just registering them to make sure someone else doesn't get a certain name later on or to cause trouble.

I had noticed we weren't listed in Google yet too. And spiders are definitely something that can be contributing the large amounts of guests but too many of those guests shouldn't be spiders, just a few.

BTW, we are currently at 134 guests with our record now standing at 155 guests at one time at 8:37 PM Mountain time. Maybe we'll see a slew of new members join up this weekend.

That "guest" thing must be some screwy UBB counting/storing method - I just cycled through all the individual boards - for a total of 15 guests (2 at Off-Topic, 1 at Mission Monitor and 12 at The Legion); on the home board, it claimed 62 guests.

There might not even be 15, since I saw my own and some other names counted on several boards, due to the refreshing time.

This happened at RKMB as well, so I suspect it's a UBB glitch.

Well, hey, at least it makes folks checking out Legion World think this is like the hottest site around!

(Not that it isn't, of course... I love this board)

Actually, I suspect it counts those people who visited THAT page only. So if there's 50 more guests on the board page than on the boards in total, 50 people (or at least 50 IP addresses) aren't progressing beyond the list of boards.

And I've submitted legionworld.net to Google now, although I have no idea how long it'll take to actually get through. They say,...

...so who knows when/if the spiders will start crawling all over the board.

Thanks for doing that SoM. It didn't even cross my mind to just submit it to them. Guess I can't think of everything.

As for the guests and your names not showing on a page I think this is the way it works. When you first enter a page (or one it has been more than 30 minutes since your last visit) you will not be listed. Then whatever UBB uses for tracking catches you were there and will keep you there for 30 minutes, or longer if you revisit the page within 30 minutes. Hence you can be on more than one board at a time.

Thanks, Sanity or Madness?!

I believe that if you select "Hide user from recent visitors list" in your profile, it will list you as a guest as well. It is possible that some of the registered members have selected that option.

Eeeeccchhhhh!!!!!

Was that a spider I just felt crawling over my last post?