While many of us were preoccupied with this past Saturdays' Geoff Cooks' charter/shed experience, I noticed this interesting stat on the bottom of the "Board" page of our forum;
"Most users ever online was 50 on Sat, 22 May 2010 08:17:25 +0000"

Can anybody explain this phenomenon?

Very interesting, Gabor - I hadn't seen that.

We've noticed surges of interest around certain events, especially when FOTR was the first to get the news out and have sensible (as opposed to acrimonious) discussions about it - the Rovos fire and crash, the first steaming of Garratt 4074 and the first steaming of Kenya Railway's 3020 were all examples that we noticed. In some cases we posted links on other internet discussion groups (eg the sar-L, East_African_Steam and Garratt Yahoo groups) which brought traffic from those sites.

But I have no idea why so many people logged in on 22 May, especially as it was too early to expect any pictures to be posted from the Geoff Cooke photo experience - they only began to appear the following day.

Do visits by google bots and misc web crawling spiders register on the stats? they can mess things up considerably.

Yes, I believe they do, although the question would still be why so many of them on that day, I suppose.

The bots etc are controlled as "members" - there is a list of them that I manage so we only get the "desirable" ones - I add to this and take away as necessary.

There are currentlky exactly 50 bots and crawlers at the moment but I do not think it is these - I have never ever seen more then 4 logged on at any one time, and that is rare!

I have on the other hand notced once up to 25 unregistered users on board!

Probably coincidence - the web is a huge place with a huge population!

Unless I have misunderstood the software, known registered Bots and crawlers do not get accumulated into the stats. Which is one reason why they are registered separately.

Most users on-line today jumped to 65 at lunch time!