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
)
