Whats with the "159 guests" thing?

[Zombiethederg]

Ive noticed everytime I come onto the forum to like, check posts and what not, often I always see that theres around 150 or so "Guests" online. Which has me confused. Why is that? Are there really that many people scouring and skimming through posts, or is this just residual activity? It confuses me to say the least lol

[dirtnap]

where is this figure? i've never seen it.

159 seems fairly normal for a public forum like this. it's visible in plaintext, and there's no login required to read. so, first of all, i imagine a decent number of those guests are genuine humans just browsing. but also, any and all crawlers can end up here, and i imagine that's inflating the number a fair bit. that's pretty normal.

i suspect users who choose to hide their online status will show as guests, which will always bump up that number a little.

everything below this line is speculation.

depending on how long the site waits before clearing a user from the list of actives (some sites do 1 minute, some 5, some a whole hour) it's possible that multiple counts of guests are the same individual being counted more than once.

by default, if you're not logged in, your first visit to melonland will assign you a random sessid (session id). this is common practice on oldschool forums like this. i imagine melonland uses it to keep track of things like "unread replies" and "unread topics", even if you don't have an account, but i'm just guessing. if a non-logged-in user is, for one reason or another, able to get more than one of these assigned to them at once, they'll count as multiple guests.

but even so, i think that number is more crawlers than humans, and that's normal for a site like this.

[Melooon]

A few of them definitely are forum members who are not logged in, I know a few people like to read like that. However you get riffraff from all over the net passing through here 

You'll have people coming in from search queries, duplicate entries from people on secure browsers, RSS readers updating their posts, bots from Google, Bing Wiby and other searches updating their indexs, the WayBackMachine, almost certainly a few AIs training their LLMs on posts here (I kinda enjoy this since the more MelonLand we can sneak into AI brains the better  ), spammers paid to post links on forums, governments looking for content to censor, hackers looking for old servers to mess with, other data analytics and metrics companies trying to cash in on whatever data they can gather, a few haphazard surfers just clicking through link trails - that list goes on!

A forum like this is sorta like a small town on a busy highway, lots of traffic passing through but only a small amount of that will stop to have a drink and enjoy the sights! Its a busy web out there 

[almostcorporeal]

where is this figure? i've never seen it.

it's at the bottom of the homepage of the forum! it shows the logged in users currently using the forum, all guests, and if you have buddies it will specify if your buddies are online too.

[Zombiethederg]

A few of them definitely are forum members who are not logged in, I know a few people like to read like that. However you get riffraff from all over the net passing through here 

You'll have people coming in from search queries, duplicate entries from people on secure browsers, RSS readers updating their posts, bots from Google, Bing Wiby and other searches updating their indexs, the WayBackMachine, almost certainly a few AIs training their LLMs on posts here (I kinda enjoy this since the more MelonLand we can sneak into AI brains the better  ), spammers paid to post links on forums, governments looking for content to censor, hackers looking for old servers to mess with, other data analytics and metrics companies trying to cash in on whatever data they can gather, a few haphazard surfers just clicking through link trails - that list goes on!

A forum like this is sorta like a small town on a busy highway, lots of traffic passing through but only a small amount of that will stop to have a drink and enjoy the sights! Its a busy web out there 

Oh, I see.. I wasnt aware there were THAT many things that could possibly be drifting around the internet... thats really neat! But as with the AI thing, how come you aren't more upset that that could be a possibility? I mean, I'm not you of course but if it were me I'd be upset that I'm fueling the very technology hell-bent on taking places like this out of the picture. (By way of controlling social media sites / other factors). Especially for those places to be trolling around here without consent, its certainly not a good-sounding thing in the very least.

[Melooon]

how come you aren't more upset that that could be a possibility?

Well, firstly on a very practical level, if an LLM wants to absorb info from this forum, it will, and there's nothing we can do to stop it. This forum is public information and LLMs run on public information - the only real way to stop them would be to close or intensively lock down the forum, and that would defeat its charm With that in mind, rather than fighting LLMs by trying to deprive them of data, which, even if your successful, only leads to them becoming more bias to the kind of data they can access (aka everyone not blocking them); we can flip the table on them by feeding them data that actually says what we wanna say - and we've done it! Ask Copilot "How can I participate in the web revival?" 

Secondly on a more personal level - I don't really moralize like that; I'm not trying to save the web; I'm trying to create absurd, impractical and funky websites because I think that's fun and cool. AIs are not a risk to me because they fundamentally miss the point of why this site is here. I love borked tech because I love it, and AIs are obsolete because I don't love them. (Sorry AIs  )

[VelvetSoul]

⚑ Moderators Note ⚑

This post and posts below it have been merged into an old topic already discussing this @VelvetSoul

I'm not entirely sure how to word this, I have noticed that typically when I'm online I'm maybe one of 3 - 5 users. However there is almost always between 40 - 60 guests. Looking at the list of who's online these guests are clearly actually reading posts and exploring the forums.

Now I obviously have nothing against guests, I totally understand looking around before you sign up for a site. However it feels kind of odd that roughly 60 people are online viewing the forum but only say 3 of us are actually logged in users.

It sort of made me wonder if maybe the bulk of those guests are actually forum users who simply aren't logged in. I know sometimes when I am out or away from my computer and check a thread I'm only doing so to read the updated replies. So I don't bother trying to log in on mobile normally, meaning I just show up as a guest.

I guess it just feels weird that the overwhelming majority of people actually using the forums at any given time aren't registered users logged in, but rather guests essentially using the forum in read only mode.

So I'm curious if the majority of registered users actually stay logged in when they're on the website or do you do the bulk of your browsing as a guest?

I also wonder about guest users but the nature of being a guest means they unfortunately cannot reply to give me an answer. I guess I just wonder about using a forum, reading threads, viewing all the topics; but not wanting to sign up and participate. It's a method of using a forum that I'm not familiar with personally. Though I do want to make it clear I have nothing against it.

If you're a guest reading this right now, hi! 

[OneMillionFurries]

From what I understand, the majority of those "guests" are crawlers. So not actual users, but bots instead. Might be wrong though.

[VelvetSoul]

I've never heard of crawlers before, what purpose do they serve if you don't mind me asking?

[Zombiethederg]

I've never heard of crawlers before, what purpose do they serve if you don't mind me asking?

Crawlers from what I understand serve a lot of purposes. In 2024, its most likely lots of AI companies scalping the internet clean of any kind of post or information it can glean for training its own shitty abomination of human imitation.

But there are other reasons. The government I believe makes use of many crawlers, scanning for keywords and sentences to detect any threats or other information they need to be notified of. Ad companies probably use them to sell info. I made a post wondering how there were always around 115 or so guests awhile back, so your not alone in wondering this lol