Hi. I am a fairly novice forum navigator, so I have a couple of questions.

• Is there really about 20-30 guests on-line all of the time?
• When I look at the Who's Online tab, I see a lot of guests that are actually spiders. Call me dumb, but what the h*** is a spider?

Anyway, I've just been kind of exploring and these are two items that keep me scratching my head.

Thanks.

Search engine spiders...Googlebot, Slurp, Scooter, etc.

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re: 20-30 guests on-line all of the time?
Actually it should be read like this: "20-30 guests online since 15 minutes ago". So the day you see 900 users online, is the day we can assume that we had a unique hit every second (in the last 15 mins)!

re: what is a spider?
I asked myself that question many, MANY times before, to be honest! Although I am STILL not certain what it is exactly, I have an opinion... A spider/search engine bot is just a program or script that fetches a web page and processes the contents of the page for whatever purpose.

Actually, I think I even wrote a script that can be considered a spider (aka bot), without realising it. If you go to www.gidnetwork.com/tools/gzip-test.php and type in www.gidforums.com and hit Submit, the script will fetch the homepage off this forum and process it for what it's supposed to do.

Once you have done that, take a look at the "Who's Online" page here and you will see the name of my "little spider" listed there.

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J de Silva
Learning Journal | GIDForums™ | GIDNetwork™ | GIDWebhosts™ | GIDSearch™

Thanks J. The time frame really helps to put things in perspective. I also tried the script and got the expected result. Cool...

A spider is a subset of a bot according to Foldoc. See
http://wombat.doc.ic.ac.uk/foldoc/foldoc.cgi?query=bot and
http://wombat.doc.ic.ac.uk/foldoc/fo...i?query=spider