Ye gads

[MelissP]

Has BLO become monstrously more popular in the last couple of days?
or perhaps I'm just imagining things :omg_smile
(up to 80 users +/- instead of the usual 10-12)

Well :sign16: if you're all real people
(if you're all web spiders, this seems like a lot of connections ...)

[nimo6211]

Hi Melissa:

I was lookimg at that too. But there are more guests. Yesterday there were 3 members online and 77 guests?

[Peter]

BLO has grown substantially over the last few years. Visits to BLO have grown about 300% in the last several months due to the great posts of our members, and Betsy's redesign of the site. BLO is also becoming well known as a forum for intersex peer support.

For the month of May, BLO had over 13,000 unique visitors (not counting web spiders). This forum is averaging about 90,000 page views a month. BLO had visitors from over 100 countries this last month.

If you see a very high number of guests on the site, you can probably divide that in half to get a good estimate of how many real guests (not web spiders) are viewing the forum. There are often 50 or more real guests on this site at one time. Many guests come to this site to get general educational information about intersex conditions.

Peter

[Betsy]

Peter is somewhat correct in that the site has grown tremendously over the past several months. However, most of those numbers you saw over the weekend were spiders. Yahoo (where we rank very well) seems to be busy with an update and google is always around as well.

Betsy

[Betsy]

I updated the spider identification strings so you can more easily tell who is a real person and who is a spider.

http://www.bodieslikeours.org/forums/online.php?

[nimo6211]

Excuse my ignorance, but what is a spider? :-?

[Betsy]

Excuse my ignorance, but what is a spider? :-?

It's a computer program that sends "probes" out into websites gathering information and pages for search engines like yahoo or google.

Betsy

[nimo6211]

...hence the name....uh......thanks Betsy. :wave1:

[MelissP]

Excuse my ignorance, but what is a spider? :-?

You know how real-life spiders spin webs? :-)
Internet spiders spin the world wide web. Every time someone goes to
a search engine, that search engine had to have a way of knowing where
to find the info online. So they have programs called spiders which just
go out and browse on websites, then automatically digest it and put a
lot of keywords on that search engine's database. All of our public posts
can be found from a search engine ...

[MelissP]

Darn. Betsy types faster than I can :-)

[nimo6211]

Thanks Melissa. I always wondered how that worked.

[Betsy]

Darn. Betsy types faster than I can :-)

LOL...but you are better at splainin'!

Betsy