"There are currently x users browsing this thread. (y members and z guests)"

[AnimalCrossingPerson]

"There are currently x users browsing this thread. (y members and z guests)"

Okay, we're hopefully all familiar with the message at the bottom of each thread saying how many people are viewing it at the moment, but what's been bothering me is, who are these guests?

Presumably they include things such as web crawlers (Google, Bing etc.) that have been to that page in the last five minutes or so and, well, anyone who isn't logged in.

What about people who use invisible mode though? Since they won't be included in the list of people viewing the thread, are they counted as a guest for that purpose or simply missing from the list?

 

[Nightmares]

Eh apparently a lot of the guests are bots, but some of them should be just normal people browsing the forum too, just not logged in or signed up

And no, people on invisible mode are counted as 'users' so they won't show up in the guest...part

 

[AnimalCrossingPerson]

Eh apparently a lot of the guests are bots, but some of them should be just normal people browsing the forum too, just not logged in or signed up

And no, people on invisible mode are counted as 'users' so they won't show up in the guest...part

Okay, so do they just cause the number of members and guests to add up or what?

I'm not too surprised that a lot of guests wouldn't be real people as the search engines go around indexing all the pages and I can't imagine people without accounts looking at many of the new threads.

 

[Shina]

damn, i know. this thing bothers me loads (especially during collectible restocks, there are a buttload of guests), i never understood why there were always more guests than members. i know one thing for sure though, that TBT's villager popularity page is very known. other than that i hav no idea.

 

[Aronthaer]

a guest is anyone viewing the page who is not logged in at the time. it doesn't necessarily mean that they're not a member of TBT, it just means they're not logged in.

 

[Trystin]

A guest is someone who isn't logged in or signed up, but viewing the thread.
A user on Invisible mode will still be counted as a member, but their name will not show up in the list of names, as you might see for example:
There are currently 6 users browsing this thread. (4 members and 2 guests)
purpleunicorns, [username]
See how it says there are 4 members and 2 guests, but only 2 usernames are listed? So 4 of those people are unaccounted for, but 2 of them are guests. That leaves 2 more people unaccounted for, meaning those 2 people are on Invisible mode since they are counted as members.