Viewer Count..

[ZeroID]

I guess the Mods keep an eye on them but do any of you ever take note of the ratio of Members to Guests viewing this forum ? :question:
Seems to hover round the 1:4 ratio which indicates two things to me.

1. This forum is providing an excellent educational and informative role to a lot of people. A tribute to the depth of knowledge and goodwill on here.

2. There are a lot of potential astronomers or interested people out there some of whom hopefully will one day register and make their first post. Nice to see when it does happen and we regularly do in the Beginners section with that first 'Hello and Help' post.

So to any of those viewers out there thinking about it, come on in. Anyone here is wiling to help and encourage and it's a fascinating hobby for anyone with an enquiring miind.

(Just a reflective moment on my part .... :thumbsup: )

[Terry B]

or that there are a lot of "bots" out there that register in the count as guests.

[ZeroID]

Yeah, well there is that but I like to take the positive approach to it all ...

[leon]

I might be getting on a bit, so I ask, what is a "bot"

Leon

[iceman]

There are certainly some bots in the 'guest' count but it only accounts for a small portion of the guest count when you view it at various times during the day.

The majority of the guests are real people - a likely combination of:
- Existing members who browse the forum as guests and only login when they want to post something
- Lurkers, who read the forum regularly but haven't registered
- New readers, who discovered the forum or a thread when searching for something through a search engine, or were linked here from other websites or forums

Leon - a "bot" is an automated search engine process that crawls the internet, crawls through websites indexing key words and information so that it can serve up links to that information when you perform a search.


Brent - your sentiment is well placed and I agree. It's always great when you see and hear stories of people that discovered the site through a search, or have been lurking for a while and decide to register and make their first post.
Hopefully it's the start of a life-long obsession with astronomy :)