I always take a peek at whose on-line to see which of you bums are hanging around here (me being on of those bums as well). I've noticed increasing numbers of guests like today for example there where 18 at one time! Numbers have been steady at around 3-5 at any given time I've looked. It's could most likely be the 30th anniversary, or let's hope it's not those used bookstore clerks looking to shutdown your hopes of an amazing collectors find…..

MIke

I believe the anonymous ones are primarily bots, spiders, etc.

Nasty spiderses.  We hates them!


But we are seeing an influx of quality members to the community, due to both 30th and the forum button being on the front page, I believe.  Yay!

FoulFoot wrote:About 2/3rds of the guests at any given time are spiders -- primarily Google.  If there were a simple modification to make it so the "most users" statistic only reflected registered users, I'd install it -- but I don't think there is.

Foul

Interesting and leads me to a question I've been wanting to ask.  What software do you use for the forums?  I've seen very similar styled forums before so I assume it's some common application.

Jupp wrote:*points to the very bottom of the page*

Thanks.  Missed that.

The key with using phpBB is to stay on top of the updates.  I learned that the hard way -- got hacked about a year and a half ago, because I was running the version supplied by the web host (which was well out-of-date).  The script kiddies hop from board to board, looking for older versions of phpBB that have known vulnerabilities.

Unfortunately, the vanilla version of phpBB still needs several modifications in order to make it fully functional.  If you're not comfortable editing php files or making SQL queries, I'd suggest you avoid the system entirely.

Should you be hacked, the bottom line is, you have no recourse.  Local & state authorities have no jurisdiction outside their boundaries, and will not bother to work with neighboring jurisdictions to prosecute.  Federal authorities require substantial dollar loss in order to prosecute, and it's tough to prove that the erasure of your non-profit forum represents a financial loss.  I was even able to find out exactly who committed the hack, but was unable to do a thing about it.  And the script kiddies are aware of that.

Foul

I just wanted to chime in and say that some of them may be registered users who are not currently logged in (much as I normally am).  I often appear as a guest because I go straight to the forums without loggin in.

As I went to login to post this, I noticed the automatically log in check box.  I don't normally use features such as these but perhaps I should, especially if it will help people sleep better at night   .

Hey Foul, when you stay on top of the updates, what do you mean?
Is there some url which announces security problems or something?
I'm running 2.0.8 - is that bad?