Guests and the PM?

Guests are almost always Google bots. Craven can address the specifics of why PM viewing would show up, but I really don't think it's anything nefarious.

Gee, you guys don't read the explanations I put on the pages do ya? Just kidding! There is no explanation on the index page but I was careful to explain this in detail on the who'd online page.

Here's the rundown:

The who's online stats is really who's on the forum at the time stats.
If you are not viewing pages on the forum you will not be counted in those statistics. So if you stay logged in to the site but navegate away you will not be counted as "online" even if you ARE online.

On this site "online" means "browsing the forums".

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More about who's online etc:

The stats are based on the last 5 minutes. So you will be on that list for 5 minutes after you leave.

Due to this 5 min window you might see some guests (on the who's online page) posting, viewing private messages etc. Those actions are supposed to be for members but that doesn't mean the security has been compromised. It just means that someone who has logged in within the last 5 minutes is using a rotating IP address (several ISPs do this, most notably AOL).

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To preempt a future question:

Search engines use robots to index pages, they don't like dynamic pages so I have added code that will allow google to index the site without a guest session ID. So if you ever see google in the who's online section it just means the google robot is indexing the site. This will probably inflate the who's online stats as it will be a spider not a human viewing it.

If that part about google sounds too techie here's the simple version:

Google's robot has a backdoor to the site so the forum can be indexed. So don't be suprised if every few months google shows up in the who's online section. It's just their bot.

To Craven de Kere, of course. He/she understands all these computer stuffs better than I do.

steissd wrote:

To Craven de Kere, of course. He/she understands all these computer stuffs better than I do.

Steissd, I believe we have reasonable, albeit not conclusive, evidence that Craven is a male. Enough, in my view, to give him a gendered pronoun when referring to him in the third person.

(I am so withdrawing that apology to Mr Happy if I am wrong!)

"Guest" is a noun which has no indication of gender - therefore NH correctly, in my view, uses she/he.