I keep noticing on the bottom of the home page, "Most Online Ever", with 249 visitors/members at one time on April 8, 2008 at 7:26 AM. That's nearly double of an average day's count. What was happening on that date that warranted so many viewers? And at that early in the morning on a Tuesday to boot? Just curious.
April 8, 2008??? That could have been the day the that:
1. the Heads Up forum was tracking Southern Railway Boxcar 526956 with a fresh green searchlight
2. the JREB url was inadvertantly linked to an aledged picture of Britney Spears
3. Emmett posted pix of his Pride of Salvisa possum pot pie
4. JREB offered free membership for the first 249 folks to log in
...or maybe it was something else
maybe that was when folks were trying to find out stuff about those F units the NS were getting up and goin.
Back then we had registration open on the site. More than likely a lot of that was bot traffic. Bots have the ability to register then come back and repeatedly search through the site for information. They don't usually move through the post pages but they still show up as online. Since then we have cracked down a lot on how they get in, and so that's why the numbers are so dramatically different.
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YUM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Possum pot pie and Brittany pix. Now all we need is some PBR and I bet we could break that record.
While there are some pretty good ideas there as to what may have caused the high number of users on that particular day, I am pretty sure Jason has the correct one
Most folks have NO idea just what a hostile place the web is for a web site, and all of the bots, spiders and other creepy crawly things that go and comb every word and image of every single web page in existence probably make up more of the traffic than legitimate users. The majority of those things are not really as evil as they may sound, and that is how search engines gather information. The more traffic a site has, the more they get hit with these things.
Our "hit" counter does break it down for us, as to who is online as a member, a guest, and yep..even the creepy crawly things. The more traffic we have in a day from legitimate users, the more of those we will have.