Forum Members/Guests ratios

[Mr_Denali]

Something occured to me today...

This has nothing to do with anything important, just something interesting

I think it would be noteworthy to start looking at the numbers of registered members online, versus guests, at certain times of the day. For example, there are currently I believe 19 Members online, compared to 155 non-registered, at 8:25 EST. Almost 8 times the amount of people registered. What does this mean? Your questions and sites are being viewed by not only the 19 member, but the other 155 non registered. Basically, the overall exposure per forum, is not the number of registered members, but the overall numbers of visitors populating any forum, at any given time.

Note- 15 Members/153 Non members at 8.29 AM EST
Ratio: 1:10.2

This is going to be fun.

[overulehost]

yeah ... it is a bit weird. Wondering where they get their traffic from

webhostingtalk looks better
There are currently 227 member(s) and 389 guest(s) on the boards

[Peo]

wht is a forum only. FreeWebspace.net is a site with a forum, that's the main difference. I beleive some people come here just to see new free hosting offers and you don't have to be a member to see that info.

[Mr_Denali]

Thats the beauty of it. You don't have to be a member. A site with more to offer than just a forum in my eyes will be better and more active than just a forum site. I am going to be monitoring other forums, for my own sake, and seeing how vast the differences are between them, and taking into account whether or not they are forum only sites, or forum+content. Im becoming a web-geek, and I cant help it.

[Mr_Denali]

I guess what I am trying to say is this, if you had a website about purple dogs, and was a member of 20 forums about purple dogs, your potential visitors/customers/clients will be more aware of your site, I.E, brand awareness.

[talkhost]

Most of these guests will be spiders such as google, google adsense, yahoo slurp, msnbot etc etc.

There is a way to show if the guests are spiders or genuine guests. The admin would need to upoad the lists of IP's of the bots, then they would show in "who's online" in the quick links option of the menu bar.

I have this enabled on my forum so the bots are shown as bots..

[Mr_Denali]

I hate spiders sometimes, 8 legs, creepy eyes, and they can come into your domain at any time.

[AvalHosting]

I hate spiders sometimes, 8 legs, creepy eyes, and they can come into your domain at any time.
lol, funny

[Corazu]

Yea, but with a proper robots.txt file, you can restrict where they crawl. Some *evil* spiders don't respect those robots.txt rules, so with a good .htaccess you can ban them...google it or something..

Regards,