A few questions after upgrading to cloud hosting

[Randy Calvert]

1 hour ago, Max said:

Yes as I stated this is a vanity stat. But it is important advertisers check things like that.

It is an issue. Competitors look too, and it is nice to get in their heads a bit.

If it seriously bothers you that much turn it off. In my own experience… serious/real advertisers are not nearly worried about “guests” because many/most of those are bots and non-real traffic (Google, MSN, crawlers, etc).  Those are not the people that are driving revenue traffic they ultimately care about.  It’s super easy to fake guests online, etc.  

[Max]

22 hours ago, Randy Calvert said:

If it seriously bothers you that much turn it off. In my own experience… serious/real advertisers are not nearly worried about “guests” because many/most of those are bots and non-real traffic (Google, MSN, crawlers, etc).  Those are not the people that are driving revenue traffic they ultimately care about.  It’s super easy to fake guests online, etc.  

I know this is a vanity stat. Some of it is to generate buzz \ get in the heads of our competitors. Maybe once a year we would tweet: Wow 1,200 Jets fans in the forums right now talking about ______. It helped generate some buzz.

We have 100% fill rate with all of our display ads and that company has our GA, so it doesn't impact revenue there at all. The advertisement that it could impact is package deals, advertisers that gets sponsored social media posts, sponsored forum threads, that kind of thing. They don't get our traffic #s when they see 700 people in the forums, they are more likely to work with us.

So this isn't about it bothering me, it is just a thread trying to figure out what changed and if I could do anything about it.

Thanks.

[Dll]

The reason is the guest caching, as covered earlier in this thread. As far as I'm aware, there's nothing youv can do, at least in terms of the way you're looking at it.

Re-framing it slightly though, maybe you could consider what you can do to encourage more of those guests to register? I'm not a fan of register walls and the like, so I'm not suggesting that sort of thing, but can you do something to make membership more compelling? Can you improve the messaging shown to guests so they're better aware of the benefits of joining?

All told, a member is far more valuable to you and your advertiser's than a guest, they're far more likely to revisit, can receive emails, notifications etc.

And for creating buzz, why not talk about the number of posts, new members joining, active members, trending topics and so on. I'd have thought those things are more likely to drive engagement than a simple 'look how many people are online' type thing anyway. 

[Jelly Belly™]

Some forum software lets you fiddle the online count by editing the whose online timeout, it used to be a thing in IPB3 too

Go to one of those "busy" sites on other platforms, hover over the usernames and you'll see that many of the online users were last active 3 days ago 🤣