I'm glad you like it, Herbie, if you you want to join and help out, just let me know.
Thanks for your kind words, Ellen. You are a tremendously valued member of this community as well. By keeping coming back, you help build a stimulating discussion here, which is really a crucial help to our nonprofit. We are all about peers connecting with one another. I am tremendously grateful to every community member who keeps coming back and sharing their perspective. You give me hope that we can create a special community that can support itself and grow, over time, to help change our confused medical system.
Just wondering--on the Forum when it lists 'Members Online' and 'robots' are listed, are those spammers? We seem to be increasingly popular with them.
The vast majority of visitors to small websites like this one aren't actually human beings, but are actually computer programs called "bots" or "robots." This is why you you shouldn't trust statistics about the number of times a page or thread has been read from small forums and web sites. Chances are, more than half of the times the page was read, it was "read" by a bot, not a real human being.
The nicer bots are from search engines. For example, Google downloads a page from our site about once every 2.5 minutes. It does this so that it knows what is on our site so that it can provide up to date results when someone searches Google. (This is why we don't allow people to post personal information on the site in public.) As you may know, when someone searches Google, it doesn't search the whole web to answer your question. Rather, it has already searched billions of pages on the web. On our site, it has indexed just over 10,000 pages, and you can search them all at
search.tmswiki.org, our search engine.
In addition to Google, Microsoft's competitor, Bing, is constantly visiting our site. For some reason, though, the most aggressive search engine is Baidu, a Chinese search engine. I suspect that it's programming isn't great because the bandwidth and other resources they consume could become a little expensive, and I bet that it would be extremely rare for anyone to be referred to our site from Baidu.
It turns out that most of the visitors that come up as "guests" rather than "robots" are actually bots as well. They are actually spammers, trying to sign up for our site and post advertisements. On average, a spam bot attempts to sign up for our site roughly every four minutes. That's what
this item is about from my todo list. It uses an ingenious piece of software that has stopped 15 bots from signing up in the last hour, but still lets real human beings through. It's quite clever.
Since most "pageviews" aren't real people, you can't generally trust statistics on web sites about how many times their pages have been read. When people with professional experience report web statistics, they use javascript based statistics rather than server based statistics. Because it is too expensive for bots to run javascript, bots don't show up on javascript based statistics. I use javascript based statistics, so you can trust the numbers that I report. However, other sites report "server based" statistics for how often it's pages are "read." Some people take these numbers at face value, but with today's internet I think that doing so could give the impression that sites are more active than they actually are. I can't know what an appropriate rule of thumb would be for any given site, but as a personal rule of thumb, I often assume that 50% of pageviews on any small site are nonhuman. 50% seems as good a number as any other.
To explain these ideas more clearly and to help people better interpret statistics about how many times a page is read, I made the following video. It is the type of thing that will only be of interest if you are genuinely interested in the subject or want to better understand online communities.
