Numbers

[johnsykes]

Seems something is amiss with numbers.....according to the bottom of the page right now, there are six members and 324 guests on this website....could that be true???

[jon]

Registered users are easy to count (when they are signed on) and keep track of because they have a user name. In fact, when we say that we are counting over the last 90 minutes, that is not technically correct. Any registered user who logs off disappears from the count immediately. Those of us who rarely explicitly logoff, even when our computer is turned off, disappear after 90 minutes of inactivity.

Guests are more difficult to count and track. How do you know if the Guest who looked at one page is the same who is now looking at another page on the site? I cannot speak for other software, but the phpBB software RadioWest is using takes the very conservative approach of assuming that all Guests with the same IP address are the same Guest.

Dial-up Internet users usually share an IP address with many other people. People in the same organization usually share the same IP address, especially at the same office location. People in the same household, if they have a Broadband Router, share the same IP address.

In any of those scenarios, the count would be smaller than reality, because multiple Guests (with the same IP address) would be counted as only one.

But, not all Guests are human beings. Search engines regularly connect to RadioWest, PSR and most other Web sites to keep their search indexes up to date. They, too, have IP addresses. Assuming they use the same IP address over a 90 minute period, they only get counted once, no matter how many pages they look at.

What we discovered is that, until a posting on an Ontario board on the CHUM 50th anniversary pics on RadioWest, most search engines did not know that RadioWest existed. It was even worse with the InvisionFree board we moved off of. It seemed to block, or at least make itself "hard to get", to search engines.

[Howard Stern]

I cannot speak for other software, but the phpBB software RadioWest is using takes the very conservative approach of assuming that all Guests with the same IP address are the same Guest.

Bullshit.

[jon]

OK, since you are not the real Howard Stern, who never has solutions to anything, just complaints, I will offer you an open forum in which to discuss proposed alternative methods ("more conservative") of counting Guests. I am sure that the phpBB development team would love to hear of a better way.

[johnsykes]

Jon, you actually think you'll get a sane response to your offer?