Ever observe how many guests are on this site?

[Beren One-Hand]

Probably many of us observe, when we are logged-in to the site that there are guests looking at the site as well.  Well last night I noticed that there were 75 guests on this site.  That's the most I've noticed all at once.  Has anyone else noticed more than that?  It would be nice if some of those guests became users and joined our community.  Just some thoughts.   

[Andúnië]

I've noticed that too. Is the counter working properly? The one day I was on and the number increased every time I refreshed the page; it got up to 182 or so at one point. I just checked the stats and it says the maximum this month is 184- must have been the same day.

[Lairënuriel]

I hate to be negative, but it could be spambots.
This site is pretty well protected from spam - but I used a free forum software program on my site and got nothing but bots posting porn.

[Wolfchild]

I agree with the notion that these are bots, but withhold some speculation towards believing that there are as many as the counter is telling us. I find similar situations on other forum sites, where you will always find more guests than members, though at the same time if you check who is online, bots will only appear a few times compared to the multitudes of unregistered members.

[chaz]

i hate spamers, they killed the last forum i joined

[Beren One-Hand]

The bot theory must be correct, 'cause right now there are 40 guests in here.  Hard to fathom that all of these would be actual people. 

  - "I hate bots!"

[Diamond]

I think that similar to this bot!guest problem is a lot of our registered users.... I was curious about the fact that there were over one thousand users here, and not too many people active on the forum anymore (), so I clicked on the link that took me to the user list. Is it just my computer, or do almost ALL our users have "1969-12-31" as their registration date?? Either there was one busy bot spamming up the website, or a huge coincidence.... Apparently none of these users have ever posted a thing.
OR, I was thinking, are all of them just former active users of the website? I know when I came back here, my post count had been reduced to 0 and my registration date was "N/A". That's understandable, considering the whole website-change that happened a while back. So maybe they're all just members who are no longer active? I could have sworn, however, that when I first came to MET in August (I think) 2004 (yes, I was only 13 then, I admit it! >.<), we had more members than we have now...but maybe I'm just dumb.
Ah, now I'm confusing myself. That tends to happen a lot. Sorry. That post was one long ramble.

P.S. Right now there are 18 "guests" on the website.

[Pulsifer]

It's my fan club.

Sorry about the bandwidth, guys.