I always thought it was just bots since if they were all real people, I'd be expecting a lot more new members.
Squidboards
isaac4
sevenleaf
interestingly if you go to the full list of online members, bots are listed separately from normal guests. some of the ‘normal guests’ actually being bots that the site isn’t picking up on is a possibility though
i have a friend who doesn’t have any interest in joining/posting but lurks here as a guest sometimes. maybe he’s not alone in that?
i have a friend who doesn’t have any interest in joining/posting but lurks here as a guest sometimes. maybe he’s not alone in that?
ThestralZ
GUESTS IF YOU CAN SEE THIS; HI! WE'RE COOL PEOPLE WHO THINK ALL OF YOU SHOULD MAKE ACCOUNTS AND JOIN THE COMMUNITY
Aiko.Octo
most bots/spiders/webcrawlers/webscrapers just impersonate browser-users and will show up as guests; it's only the big-name ones that declare themselves and show up in the bots list. Judging by the pages that they are 'looking' at, which are mostly ancient inactive threads and random user profiles, I'm inclined to think that they actually are mostly bots. That said, 300+ still does seem... excessive.
ThestralZ
Why are they going through the old threads? What are they looking for? This feels like it's slowly turning into an arg