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The figures are also consistent with other forums running VB3, and what we have seen happen here is identical to what happened after VBForums upgraded.

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As I said, I think there is a suspicious proportion in the "guests" online number. Looking at other forums prior to our upgrade their guest numbers were large, but I did not pay much attention to it. Now that our number has jump so dramatically (and pretty much right from the start after the upgrade) it has to make one wonder. Certainly the improved search engine stuff would be expected to have an effect on people finding this (or any) site and coming here. But I think there is reason for healthy suspicion that the jump is a bit extreme. It is just too odd that suddenly, just about any hour of the day or night, our numbers are so much higher. It can't be that that many people out there are running around using search engines looking for online help forums and then going to these and just hanging out all the time. When numbers look too good to seem true, they often are.

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The figures are also consistent with other forums running VB3, and what we have seen happen here is identical to what happened after VBForums upgraded.

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Which other forums, JupiterMedia ones?

As for new members joining, I would expect an improvement post upgrade. However, as I said earlier. If you look at the the period from when we upgraded to today there have actually been less new members join than in the same period last year. Not saying definatively what that means. But it does show that statitics can show a lot of things.

Page loads and that are in the PHP side, if that is what V bulliten is running on. Ip would be listed with the uploads

The jump in guests online did not start immediately, it has been steadily climbing since the upgrade. The average number of guests online were 32 for the 23 days prior to the upgrade, and 92 for the 23 days since the upgrade (all figures taken at approximately 1900 UK time). If anything I had hoped for a bit more of a dramatic increase, given that we are far more visible in the search engines now.

The other forums that I collects stats from include some JM sites and some non JM sites.

In this period last year we had at least as many guests online as we have seen in the last few days, the numbers dropped off sometime late last summer. So I would expect there to have been more members joining this time last year, since we have only got back up to last years guest figures in the last 10 days.

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The average number of guests online were 32 for the 23 days prior to the upgrade, and 92 for the 23 days since the upgrade

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That's a 3 to 1 increase. Just a bit too suspicious.

And when you say "suspicious" what do you mean? What are you insinuating?

Just what I have from the start. Namely that there is something in the new board software (and not unique to vdr) that is different such that the numbers being seen/displayed (and in particular "guest" numbers) now vs before the upgrade do not lend themselves to a direct comparison. That something is leading the numbers now to appear higher than they really are (at least in relative terms), or it could be that the numbers before were appearing lower than they really were. And by "something" I mean perhaps the way the numbers are gathered, the timing, or the source of information the numbers are derived from.

Again, my suspicions are not raised soley by what has happened here at vdr. It is this coupled with the fact that now when I go look at other sites (using similar board oftware) and see their numbers and really look at them, I see these glaringly high "guest" numbers (and also skewed relative the "member" numbers at the time). Before I just kind of accepted the "guest" numbers, but now...

Now a legitimate question would be "so what?". Well, the only so what is that if one is going to be analyzing the effects of the board upgrade in regard to online activity changes ya really have to be sure a) that the numbers are a meaningfull reflection of the number of people using or lurking at the board at a given time, and b) that the numbers now can be compared properly and directly with numbers from before (the upgrade).

Actually, having poked around a bit I think JP might have hit on something (at least a part of it) several posts back when he said "I assume bots account for some portion, since this version is far more spider friendly". It seems this has been a common suggestioned reason (bots and deep indexing, spiders, etc) given to people noticing big jumps in online users related to vbulletin 3. It does make sense at least in terms of skewing the numbers (which would come in in the "guest" figures) high. And if this is the case then it does mean that to compare online numbers (other than member counts) now to the pre-upgrade environment cannot be readily done as it is comparing apples and oranges (or perhaps as our friend Train says: apples to dump trucks :D ).

Addendum: One of the suggested features for upcoming versions of vbulletin I see is to have Who's Online show members + guests + bots as opposed to just members + guests as now.

Addendum 2: I see a post over at Daniweb where someone asked last year about "why all the guests". And they were told essentially it was caused largely by bots, etc.

Addendum3: Just say one post out and about where in response to a question about bots in the guest count one guy said about his experience "I had a bot crawling my forum early today. The number of forum guests were 200ish instead of usual 5ish." So it seems they can rack up some (false) numbers.

Until and unless we we determine the origins of the guest counts they do not mean to much statistically. So far we have two sources, true guests and search bot queries. And if they index us how many queries will we get? Gots to do some looking up here.

Absolutely GG. And, going beyond even statitistics one could say if a suficient number of these connections are not real people then things like the bandwidth impact implications and perhaps the notion of blocking some of these connections while letting others through could be worth looking at. I see reference to (I think it is) a file called robots.txt as a means of controlling things potentially.

And why the heck would we want to block search engines from indexing the site? We want the bots here, high search engine rankings are a good thing.

I fail to see the relevance at all of whether the number of guests online is 100% accurate or not, nor do I see any relevance in what proportion of guests are indexing bots. As a guide for comparing how well we're doing with other sites running the same software it has its uses, beyond that it is a fairly meaningless figure. The much more important metric of how many new members are joining (which is, of course, verifiable - BJ gets notified of every new member registering), has shown a marked increase since the upgrade. That increase is largely propotional to the increase in guests online, which suggests that the figure isn't too far out actually, and is exactly what I would expect. To join you first have to find the site, which is now possible since we are back in the search engine rankings again, then you have to be a guest before you can register. That is what has been happening since the upgrade and there isn't a thing that's suspicious about it.

We want every search engine spider on the planet here, as often as they like. Since the upgrades, all the sites running the new software show improvement in SE ranking. If you search e-commerce forums, our e-commerce site comes up #1 and that 1 was upgraded just before this one.

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Originally Posted by JPNYC

We want every search engine spider on the planet here, as often as they like. Since the upgrades, all the sites running the new software show improvement in SE ranking. If you search e-commerce forums, our e-commerce site comes up #1 and that 1 was upgraded just before this one.

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I have to agree 100% on this. Once we are in a SE database, the bots will keep visiting to make sure the data they have is correct. And the more active VirDr is the more often it will get queried by the SE. And a popular site or frequently used site will get visited more often. However, the more active a website, the more often it will get visited. If a website changes frequently, the search engine will send bots by more often. This is also true if the website is extremely popular, or heavily trafficked.

This could account for the jump in the individual queries as we change alot in a twenty four hour period. Now the question is can we separate the true guest queries from the SE queries. If we can do that then we could run more accurate statistics. Or compile our information differently.

And are there any other types of queries that should be considered?

And what are there, nine major search engines to consider?

This may be the skewing I referred to in an earlier post.

What we have then are Search Engines that because of our software are finding us user freindly. This is what we want to have. We can take and increase our marketing by looking at this site through the eyes of a SE looks like to me.

Well as far as I can see, the number of users online has only a very minor level of importance. We use separate software to check usage, and this software also has # of post stats by month available to admins.

Wow, let’s calm down here a little. Nobody is under attack here. No one said anyone or anything someone was doing was “suspicious”. The term was used strictly in the context of the guests online number jumping dramatically (the rise being suspicious). This is just a discussion going on here of something noticed (not just here but in other threads) since the upgrade. Something that is on one hand a curiosity, and on the other is something (as it relates to people actually online at vdr throughout the day, etc) that does tie in to the health and well being of vdr. And this is something we all have a stake and an interest in, and something in our collective province.

First, no one was or is talking about or advocating preventing legitimate search engine probing of this site. No one has said that we would want to do anything that would negatively impact things that would legitimately result in the raising of our search engine rankings and presence. But there can be activities by rouge/bad bots/spiders and probing by engines that is useless (or less useful), and it is these types of things that can fall in to the category of stuff perhaps to be blocked if possible. Now we already prevent a lot of useless and unwanted activity by restricting the viewing/accessing of certain things to only logged on users (thank god). But there’s certainly no downside to reducing (further reducing) useless/unwanted probing and bandwidth utilization where it might exist. This is all just brought out in the context of a “discussion”.

But let’s back up maybe a little bit here… The dramatic increase in “guests” online was noticed and has come up before since the upgrade (by me, us, other members). It may not have been something keeping people awake at night worrying about, but… And up to this point it is pretty clear we (all) did not have a real (valid) understanding of what was going on in regard to the “guest” number (by virtue of postings about it previously). The assumption seems to have been that this number by and large represented members who hadn’t logged on and/or people visiting/browsing the site that had not yet registered. In other words, “guests” were seen pretty much as real people.

But now (by virtue of seeing what other site owners and vbulletin creators/developers are saying) it seems this is not true necessarily, at least not with VB3. In fact, the guest number can be and often is largely not representative of real people lurking at a board. Because of VB3’s much greater spider/bot friendliness it turns out that “substantial” connections can be generated by these spidering/bot activities, and these connections show up as “guests”. And from what others seem to say/see the guest number often is comprised mostly of connections that are not by real people. With our prior software this was not the case. Because it was much less spider/bot friendly the connections generated through this activity were far less (seemingly negligible). So, whereas under our prior board software we could pretty much look at guest numbers as a valid (much more valid) indication of real people (browsing) on vdr at a given time, now it seems this is, or often may not be, the case. So if nothing else some new and greater understanding of or insight into a phenomenon going on since the upgrade was done.

Now it may well be that now we can no longer really look at online numbers, or at least the guest part, for any meaningful info/measures. And if so, then that is good to know. But, when the online numbers do (or do largely) reflect “real people”, or can be made to do so, they can be of some degree of value. They can provide one piece of information in bigger pie. In the “vdr seems a little sick” thread it was discussed and considered of some meaning. It can (when the numbers are real) be of some value in such areas as looking at lurkers vs those actually registering, looking at (existing) member participation (another key priority we have moving forward), doing some site-to-site comparisons, etc. Bottomline: it isn’t that these numbers are the end all to beat all, just that they could (if real) be added info.

Now… Sparks, you mention that you are showing numbers of new members registering since the upgrade inline with the online numbers. I’m not sure what you mean by this. It might help if ya gave some actual numbers and breakdowns. As a comparison, it looks to me (based on memberlist data) that there have been (give or take a couple) 372 new registrations since the new board went in and through yesterday. Now that's something like a doubling in the rate compared to the period in 2005 prior to the upgrade. But we very frequently/generally see our online guest numbers in higher proportions than this relative to what they were pre-upgrade. Just out of curiosity what are your numbers, how are you correlating registrations to online users, etc?

On the new members registrations… It is good to see that we appear (can’t jump the gun quite yet) to have taken a good step in the right direction as far as increasing new member registrations. In the period from the beginning of 2005 until the upgrade, 75 days, we had added 567 new members (down from 893 during the same period a year ago). Since the upgrade, 24 days, we have added 372. That’s a real good and positive rate change. Now, to be fair, we didn’t do quite as well (close though) as we did (even without search engine presence) in the same period (3/17-4/09) last year when we added 418 members (hmmm, makes ya wonder what our numbers would have been last year had we had the better SE presence). Nonetheless, positive steps must be seen as positive steps. We’ll have to see how the second quarter of 2005 shapes up. If we can maintain our current average rate we can come in inline with new member additions for the same quarter last year. Time will tell…

Im sure this will ruffle someones feathers....but....darn...dont you all have anything better to do....spend this time helping with problems or doing research.....worrying about the number of guests and if they are accurate....seems like a terrible waste of a gorgeous Sunday afternoon....I for one...am going to waste it watching the NASCAR race and The Masters.