We set a record today for most on line

[Jerry]

49 was the number. A veritable crowd.  Can we all fit into the live chat room?

[sushi]

I was there 

[Sunbeam56]

I have a habit of popping in during the day - between tasks.
Looking through peoples' gardens clears my head for the next task. 

[Joyce]

Me too! 

[Esther]

Me too. It's kinda like the forum calls out to me and being the chatterbox that I am, I can't resist.

[Jerry]

me too!


as Sean predicted we may have 1000 members by September!

Off to Fresno this morning only 102 there the paper says...ugh!

[miguynmkoi]

The record happened around 4am!!!!  Don't you ponders sleep?  Maybe in the wee hours of the morning we can do chat while we guard our ponds from invaders! 

[Sean]

That record is only how many people are on line at the same time, we have many more who visit the site daily and multiple visits are not recorded. This time of year we have approximately 140 - 150 individual people visiting the site per day and many who return several times per day. If each hit was calculated we would show thousands of hits per day, this does however include spiders that crawl the site and update the various search engines with information that we all post.

Cheers,
Sean

[greenthumbnails]

That record is only how many people are on line at the same time, we have many more who visit the site daily and multiple visits are not recorded. This time of year we have approximately 140 - 150 individual people visiting the site per day and many who return several times per day. If each hit was calculated we would show thousands of hits per day, this does however include spiders that crawl the site and update the various search engines with information that we all post.

Cheers,
Sean

So that's what a SPIDER is...I always wondered what that was.  But why would there be something like 20 spiders or so?  Are there truly that many search engines?

[Sean]

Right now there are 240 Yahoo spiders crawling American Ponders, that just means that Yahoo has several instances of itself looking over 240 topics on our site and collecting data. Google has one instance of itself crawling American Ponders but the Google spider will stay on longer and collect more data than one instance of the Yahoo spiders which are only looking at one topic at a time.

The good part about Yahoo checking so much of our site is that what Google and other search engines miss here, they will find when they crawl the Yahoo search engine so we have double the exposure.

Cheers,
Sean

[Esther]

Sean that was interesting. I never really understood how a spider worked. Haha, just realized WEB--spider.

[Jerry]

It is a great compliment too!
We are worthy of the search.

[karen J]

Sean, thanks so much for the great explanation. I understand spiders, but I never knew how visits were tabulated. I'm one of those who checks in between tasks, and always wondered if that was tabulated as one visit or several visits.

[Julles]

I hang mostly on Pond Chat, but have started exploring other categories.  What amazes me is how many people are regulars on a whole lot of categories.  AND participate in other ponding forums, too.

Don't you people have jobs??  Families?  PONDS??  Or maybe you just don't sleep???   

[Jonna]

I don't have a job but I do have a life    What I do is use the line at the top left, right under my name, that says "show unread posts since last visit".  It skips around to all the forums and just shows the ones that are new.  I don't read all the posts, just dabble through ones that sound interesting but they are from all the different areas.  Try it, it's a lot easier.