vintagemxr
12-15-2011, 03:01 AM
This subject has come up before and again today in another thread (http://www.motorcyclistcafe.com/forums/showthread.php?11210-About-the-New-Members-%28New-Members-Do-Not-Read%21%29) where I had to burst Jack's bubble about how many people are on-line here at any one time. I decided it was better to put the whole answer in this forum.
For what it's worth, the "Currently Active Users" thing is at the bottom of the forum home page is controlled by the "cookies time out setting" which was set for 2 hours. I cut it back to 10 minutes to show a more realistic number. Essentially it now shows how many people have visited the site in the last 10 minutes (I think). Keep in mind that "visiting the site" can mean that someone is spending time reading and posting or is merely someone who spotted phrase or a picture using Google and clicked on the link to see what's what and then vanished after 5 seconds. Even 2 seconds counts as a visit.
"Visiting the site" can also mean a search engine bot crawling the site and collecting information for one of the search engines like Google or Yahoo. That happens almost constantly. Actual Cafe member visits here average about 32 per day. Our busiest member day this year was April 19th when we had 45 member visits.
Over all the Cafe gets somewhere around 800,000 - 1,000,000 hits per year (I haven't looked at the server stats in a year) but those numbers don't mean a whole lot since most of them are hit and run things. As the old saying goes "There are lies, damn lies, and statistics."
the other Doug
For what it's worth, the "Currently Active Users" thing is at the bottom of the forum home page is controlled by the "cookies time out setting" which was set for 2 hours. I cut it back to 10 minutes to show a more realistic number. Essentially it now shows how many people have visited the site in the last 10 minutes (I think). Keep in mind that "visiting the site" can mean that someone is spending time reading and posting or is merely someone who spotted phrase or a picture using Google and clicked on the link to see what's what and then vanished after 5 seconds. Even 2 seconds counts as a visit.
"Visiting the site" can also mean a search engine bot crawling the site and collecting information for one of the search engines like Google or Yahoo. That happens almost constantly. Actual Cafe member visits here average about 32 per day. Our busiest member day this year was April 19th when we had 45 member visits.
Over all the Cafe gets somewhere around 800,000 - 1,000,000 hits per year (I haven't looked at the server stats in a year) but those numbers don't mean a whole lot since most of them are hit and run things. As the old saying goes "There are lies, damn lies, and statistics."
the other Doug