Who are all these guests?

[Oak Tech]

This forum is a great resource--please leave it alone as it is. There is nothing to say that forcing people to join is going to increase the contributions.

Bob (a registered member who automatically logs in but does not contribute very often)

[Digitalwoodshop]

I have a un usual view of this... Since I offer Phone Tech Assist I have had a few phone calls from people that read the forum and never post... Some may have very well been guests.... I have walked them through fixes.... Many tell me they don't understand how to post with the new format....

My suggestion is that Forum How To Video be made and posted on the LHR in a easy to see format for the challenged users. Even I get overwhelmed with some computer stuff and I have been doing this for years...

AL

[WRW]

I to was a long time lurker before joining this forum and then after the change in the forum I would log out to view the posts that didn't get read earlier in the day. It is often several days between having the time to sit down and enjoy the information that had been recently shared and there would be many pages and posts to go through. I have noticed that as I go through the posts last night and this morning that has been changed and I can stay logged in walk away and come back to continue enjoying the forum. (Thanks whoever)

I have not posted often in the forum as when I was first lurking I noticed that people would post a question and get an answer to the effect that "The question has been answered many times and they should search before asking." So I got into the habit of searching first (despite the frustration often caused by the limitations of the search engine on the forum) and would most often find the information I needed to answer my current question. And quite frequently get side tracked for hours reading other interesting posts that often answered questions I had not even thought to seek answers for yet.

Ok, I am starting to ramble on, so in short nothings perfect and I still believe this is One Of The Best Forums out there. Thanks once again to all the Old and New members whom have shared there knowledge, insight and sometimes zany and fun ideals.
Have a great day All.

[jaroot]

I just figured out that if you "mark forum read" then you can select "new posts" and it will give you the option of listing all posts entered for the last 24 hrs without logging out. That way you can see the recent posts without being "a guest".

I'm sure that this is nothing new to most of you but I didn't know so I had been logging out and being one of the "guests".

[fwharris]

Is this different than just clicking the What's New? box?

[jaroot]

Yes. What's new will still bring you to the last few postings. But once you mark the forum read ( under the forum actions menu) when you select "new posts" or "what's new" you will be given the option to view all post entered in the last 24 hrs.

[Kenm810]

11-20-11 2:45pm

Just took a quick look --There are currently 86 users online. 9 members and 77 guests

Of the 86 users online 42 were Spiders = nearly half

[dbfletcher]

And I've been reading some bad things on the baidu spider. What are your thoughts on it Eddie??

[eelamb]

The baidu spider is from china, it is more of a nuisance than anything else, chewing up bandwidth of the site since it visits 20+ times per day. Initally it was thought to disregard the robot.txt and search all files/folders. But that was found to be not true. It can be stopped using the .htaccess environment command if webmaster of the site finds it is using too much bandwidth, which is slowing down access to his site. They want to be the next google search engine and they are pushing hard to get there.

[lynnfrwd]

Seems like every time I block one set of IP #s, they come in with a new set.