lots of "Guests" on the forum lately...

[AG-wolf]

http://img534.imageshack.us/img534/6852/guest.gif
(11k, 800x582)

And one registering apparently as I took that screenshot :P

This spike has been on-going for the last day or so, and I'm more than willing to bet it's due to the Studio Liverpool news. I wonder how many of the lurkers and transients are [ex?] Sony employees scouring the board, or perhaps simply random people trying to use Google-fu to find any more information....

[SaturnReturn]

Many of them seem to be Google, MSN and yahoo search bots, which are a frequent presence. But I expect some are related to the recent bad news too.

[Lance]

Searchbots almost always outnumber signed-in members since each search engine can link to several topics at a time. I've seen the yahoo searchbot on its craziest days a couple of years ago looking at more than 50 threads simultaneously. But I'm sure our actual peopleguests are higher in number lately.

[AG-wolf]

Is there any way to make the forum actually LABEL the web-crawling bots? Another forum I used to frequent would actually show when Google, Yahoo, and etc were browsing around

[ACE-FLO]

And why not :? I guess quite a few peeps would be here for the recent news as well as other reasons. But um, I'm not entirely sure if "guests" would like to have their source exposed. Part reason why they choose to remain guests maybe? the privacy ... grrt.

[Lance]

They're already 'labeled' if one is a mod because we can see their IPs. Can you see these also? I don't know if vBulletin has a facility to show other categories on the front page, or to separate the categories on the Who's Online page. SMF does and it's a freebie, so I might think that vB does also. Whether this is a worthwhile thing is another question.

[Frances_Penfold]

The traffic could also be from gamers interested in the goings-on with Studio Liverpool, but not necessarily hardcore fans of WipEout games. The WOZ has been recently been cited by neogaf, for example.

[AG-wolf]

was Neogaf the same forum where that G.A.M.E. 3.0 Wipeout HD companion album was released?

[Dan Locke]

Yes, it was.

[infoxicated]

There has been a bit of a spike the last few days - pretty much the usual size of increase for when there's some news related to the game.

I've attached a screen grab from this month's analytics report for anyone that's interested.

[Lance]

Near 30 percent spike in numbers.

The one thing that surprises me a bit is that average time per visit is less than ten minutes.

Also interesting that the average number of pages read per visit is approximately nine.

[ACE-FLO]

Could be aliens, scanning the forum, thinking "Our plan has worked, we have seen to the disbandment of SL, our Alien spies at Sony performed most excellently :evil now the world will never develop Anti-Gravity Technologies - we are free to roam the skies of Earth, harvesting human beings for the continuation of our species :evil mMwuahahahaaaaahaaaahhaaaa"

What do you think?