of "Guests" and "users"

Well, there might be some deleted user accounts, blocking some numbers, so we really have a set of 820 numbers counting users, but it's not the set 821, as should be..

does this mean that when I joined there were 979 users but in the some ~16 weeks (wow, where does the time go?) since then we have lost 60 users even after the german discworld convention? And I know that I personally sent at least a dozen new members weloming PMs not including the time I spent over-seas. wow. Why are people dropping from the site so fast?

They aren't. There were less than 979 members when you joined as we had deleted various spammers and page pirates before, and as Elerias rightly said, those numbers aren't re-used. Also the Top 10 page isn't the definitive source for membership info for various reasons. Currently there are 1160 registered members on the site (as taken from the users table of the database this morning). There was a spike after the German Convention where over 100 people joined but this has tailed of in the past week or two. We hope the improved site performance will increase the membership take-up and interaction with the site by all members.

Also the huge number of guests on the site, as Dewi said here, are mostly search bots.... which is a nice thing as well. An increased search engine profile will increase membership take-up, especially after Making Money is released in September

The numbers represent the number of sessions opened. When I looked, there was some repetition from google (6 different sessions from the same IP) so I can reduce a little of that by grouping by IP. But there were also 30-odd from different yahoo bots, each on a different IP. Like I said on the post Lee linked to, I'll start blocking those bots from the listing (not from the site, just from being listed on those

Trouble is, looks like I'd need to be blocking entire class Bs, which is sledgehammer/nut behaviour. There has to be a better way. Maybe we could detect whether that IP had retrieved robots.txt and if so, mark it as "bot" unless it logged in. I suspect this is a problem that other people have dealt with successfully, so I'll do whatever "best practice" is.

my dad (who has a class C by the way) has a similar approach to spam. If he gets spam from an IP he blocks it and if he gets span from the same network twice he blocks the whole thigs (he has blocked over a thousand networks believe)

+++This aint entirely apropriate but when i first joined it was a stroke of luck i found the live thud otherwize i would ave been stumped!+++
+++Maybe you should make it easier to join?+++
+++And guests dont talk in the live thud either!+++
+++Sorry, ive had my rant+++
+++Hex+++

i don't think it can get much easier to join...and the live thud area is right where you'll see it,when i joined that was the first thing i found and went to,after the rules of course...

i still don't know what the hell it is.

I came i saw the rules and read some comments and was SHOCKED to find that no-one had added a golem to their ultimate soccer team and joined just so i could express this opinion

didn't we have that already?

not before I jpoined some 16wks ago

oh well,time flies when you're throwing bananas at it...