The Guest Count on a Forum

[Jayson]

It's supposed to show visitors, but could be showing bots. Can we really trust it? Anyway, nowadays it's tough for a lot of forums to get visitors so an owner might be cynical.

Anyway, also, there is a scam among people selling traffic where bots are sent and not people! That's despicable.

 

[Page]

Guest can help your growth, but not your content count. Many Forums and blogs do offer (even my own forum) guest posting that people do not have to register an account to join. Yet I have my end setup where they comment and make posts and afterwards they have to join and make an account to get their content approved.

You do anything to make it easy for traffic and growth. even if they made a comment and did not even join, at least you have content. At times its 50/50 meaning you get spam and idiots. WIth guest posting, you would have to set it up to be approved rather than public right away.

 

[Demon_skeith]

I remember my site having like 600 one day at a time, I'm pretty sure it was mostly bots.

 

[Ash]

I remember my site having like 600 one day at a time, I'm pretty sure it was mostly bots.

Yeah, this is the main reason why I just ignore it on all forums.

There was a brief period where we had a large number of "guests" on at the same time. It was clear that there were mostly bots.

 

[Demon_skeith]

Yeah, this is the main reason why I just ignore it on all forums.

There was a brief period where we had a large number of "guests" on at the same time. It was clear that there were mostly bots.

Just wish it didn't cause such a large strain on the site with so much invading traffic.

 

[apathy]

Yeah it's not something that can be really trusted, even though a lot of forum software like Xenforo does separate guests from bots, there are still a bucket load that aren't in Xenforo's list and end up appearing as legit guests.
Kind of an endless uphill battle trying to keep track of new bots so it's understandable why Xen can't catch all of of them.