Yes, it's true. This number doesn't include search engine bots that might be currently browsing the site. It's derived from active user sessions and is stored in the database. Users are dropped from the database table that tracks this info 20 minutes after their last page request. So there's a period of 20 minutes where a user may have left but we haven't written them off as departed. (Sometimes people read topics or author posts for longer than 20 minutes but this situation is handled properly and they aren't double-counted on their next page request. We've been getting about 40,000 visits a day to the forum the past couple of weeks. It makes sense that there's 200+ people on the site at a time to reach those kinds of numbers.
Yeah. I don't know if you can do it on this site but I've been on forums where you can see all users who are logged in unless they've set themselves "invisible" and "Yahoo SLurp Spider" (creepy name, if ya ask me) always has multiple entries.
I could easily add that type of feature and we considered it in the past. It's part of the reason that I keep track of who's online. The admins can see who's online and what page their reading in the forum but that's not displayed for anyone else. The overwhelming majority of people did not want to be identified as browsing the site. Yahoo Slurp and Googlebot, as well as all of the other search engine bots wouldn't be on the list. They aren't counted as users. A "user" accepts cookies. Search engine bots don't.
Quantcast is usually a good choice for independent traffic stats if you're curious about such things (as I often am). I find it to be more realistic and accurate than Alexa.
That might be more appropriate. But I'm not sure why the numbers are different for forum.adultdvdtalk.com and adultdvdtalk.com. Both host names use the same tracking code so all of the visits are lumped together. I do like that these third-party traffic services exist. I don't mind that this info is public. The forum vs. all-ADT traffic reports are interesting to look at. (I have never looked at the forum-only one, didn't know it existed.) With a little basic math you can see that when the forum has 400+ users there's most likeley more than that browsing the reviews and price search.
BTW, watch for the jump when Quantcast updates. Traffic has been WAY up since the 3rd. We're seeing 85k people visiting the site a day the past few days.
I saw it hit 485 earlier today. The extra traffic is nice but I'm just thrilled that the site is handling all of these extra users without any new server hiccups or slowdowns. I watched the performance monitor for a while earlier today and I think the servers will handle about 1000 simultaneous forum users before any serious slowdowns occur.
