4000+ users online - really?

[AlecTrevelyan]

I keep seeing 3 or 4,000+ users shown as being online in the community. I know there are apparently 23,000+ members, but the number of online users rarely used to top 200 or so. Are we under attack from bots or something?!

[HTCPCP-TEA]

Over the last year or so, I have rarely seen more than 100 people logged in and active on our community pages, likely due to time zone etc. 

I too see a very high increase in such statistics

It is odd. I wonder if there's been a huge recruitment drive, and error with stale sessions being recorded, or indeed something more sinister.

I can promise one thing, it wasn't/isn't me 🙂

[SamanthaO_isc2]

Thank you for letting me know about this. I am looking into it to see if it is a true number of online users or something else. 

[Chuxing]

I would guess there is a  sampling time window, say, 24hr, for the statistical accumulation. It is probably not a real-time statistics.

[rslade]

> AlecTrevelyan (Contributor III) posted a new topic in Member Support on

>   I keep seeing 3 or 4 thousand users shown as being online in the community. I
> know there are apparently 23 thousand members, but the number of online users
> rarely used to top 200 or so. Are we under attack from bots or something?!  

Huh. You're right. Hadn't noticed that.

It's obviously a recent change, and, I suspect, is related to the sign in/SSO
problems, which also appear to have changed recently. Until a couple of months
ago (last time I paid any attention to it) the highest I'd ever seen was 83. As
noted elsewhere, they obviously keep us signed on with a fairly robust cookie, so
maybe the 4,060 (at the moment) is the number of not inactive cookies rather
than active users ...

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[rslade]

They seem to have either fixed or reset it: we're currently at 95 ...

[AlecTrevelyan]

Back up to 4,000+ again now I see.

[rslade]

> AlecTrevelyan (Contributor III) posted a new reply in Member Support on

> Back up to 4,000+ again now I see.  

Silly us. We were taking them seriously, thinking that "Users online" actually
meant it was a count of users online.

Obviously, this is actually a random number generator, kindly provided so that we
can seed our crypto modules ...

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[Shannon]

This is interesting. On the 7th, @AlecTrevelyan noticed that it was 4000 +, on the 8th; @rslade found that it had dropped to 95; some 14 hours ago @AlecTrevelyan sees it as back at 4000 +; now I'm getting it at 153.

If the counter was put there primarily to cater to motivation / enthusiasm, we definitely can't bank on it being accurate.

[SamanthaO_isc2]

Thank you all for posting about this. I have seen the number varying greatly myself, and I am working with our vendor to help identify what the cause may be so that we can fix it. When I have more information, I will keep you all updated.