@Region Philbis,
We had a chance to tweak the online count, and have made it a lot more meaningful by filtering out multiple sessions by bots. Bots don't use cookies so they used to inflate the numbers, but now we limit all guest sessions to one ip for the online count, and no matter how many pages a bot visits it will show up as one online user per ip.
The last few days have all been records in traffic because the funny signs topic was submitted to stumbleupon (if you want ridiculous traffic to your topics stumble them, if they are good you may see a lot of visitors, over 20,000 a day some of these days) but the online number looked like any day with lots of search bots.
Now, the people online number has a lot more meaning, and if you see a big number up there that will almost always (there are some ways I can imagine around it but I've never seen them happen) represent a human spike and not any bot activity. The last software, and our previous way of counting sessions on this software had a lot more bot traffic inflation to that number than we have now, so expect smaller numbers and if they are large, then something's going on for real this time. So if anyone still wants to keep count, let's reset the record keeping and only count records after today.
.. 