Guests, guests and more guests...

[AHadley]

It's quite astonishing how many guests there are on this board. Right now, for example, there are 21 people browsing - only 5 are registered members (Steeveeo, Mr X, Raven, ScarletTomato and myself). Almost all of these users are browsing the forums (only one is Nothing - or nothing you can see...).

I would urge these guest users to join in the fun - if you don't find what you're looking for, you can ask . Remember, this community is friendlier than most, new members are most often welcomed - with open arms.

[squirrelof09]

Some of them are probably web crawlers, spiders you name it. I have an addon on my forums that tell me who is actually a guest and who is actually a spider,

http://www.forums.bzfiend.com/index.php?action=who

[Dianoga4]

I've been a mod on another forum for a few years now and I can almost guarantee you that most of those "guests" are actually like Google Spiders, Yahoo! Slurp Spider, MSN Bot Spider, etc. I just looked on the forums that I mod on and out of the 7 "guests", 4 of them are what I just listed.

I'm not saying that none of them aren't legit guests but maybe just not as many as you might think.

[Nielk1]

BZComplex actually doesn't get too many bots. It automatically recognizes them and puts them in the logs as users with gray color applied. It lists them as browsing users on the bottom if you catch them.

Don't underestimate legitimate guests.

[AHadley]

I am also seeing Google and MSN spiders on the list mind. There may be some that slipped through the net, or some people who disguise their user agents.

[mrtwosheds]

I have been quite surprised at the number of new players around recently. I guess the generation that bought BZ2 have reproduced, and fished out their best old game to try and keep their (insert adjective of choice) offspring from demanding all the latest Games.