Unusual numbers of guests on your forum?

[randychase]

I have one forum that happily chugs along with 1-4 users online at any one time.

I allow the forum to show the users and guests online.

Lately, I have seen guest after guest add to the total, so that we go from 1 user and 0 guests to 1 user and 20 guests in 10 minutes. And then they one by one go away until there are no guests.

Any idea why? A marauding band of wayward internet forum thugs? Online ghosts?

Any way to tell where they are coming from?

Not really worried or anything, just find it odd.

[Scott MacVicar]

There search engine spiders, dont worry there just indexing your forums.

[randychase]

Thanks, that makes a lot of sense.

[ccd1]

I hate it when it happens too. All the sudden I have 13 guests and it throws it all off. The thing with the spiders is that they have so many IP's (you can usually tell that the last 3 numbers are the only ones different) that they do this.

I'm getting cached a lot right now :|

[N9ne]

Yeah i'm getting a lot of search engine bots recently, had 20 earlier.

[Richy T.]

It is also possible that somebody posted a link to your forum or a specific thread somewhere else.