What If
 

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Currently there are 492 people on 986forum.com
463 of these are guests, just think “what if” each of you were to join the forum what an active and informative place this would be.

The numbers are a bit misleading. Often when we leave, we are automatically signed out. So when I check in on the forum, sometimes I don't sign in unless I have a post to make, so I would be seen as a guest.

And I wonder how many of those 'guests' are simply spammers posting their spam? It made a great Monty Python sketch, but in reality, spam sucks.

I see what you mean and you are I'm sure correct.
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Most of these guests are bots that scan the content of the forum.

Regards, Markus

Right. Search engine crawlers, I think scan forum content for updates quite frequently. You can also see the direct results if you search (e.g., "google") something and find any recent forum posts come up in the results. That wouldn't work without the crawlers.

There was a forum "member" recently also, who was actually a spam bot, who I reported. They had accumulated dozens of posts which were all robotic posts - many of which would simply repeat previous content in the thread. Some would combine content from more than one post in the thread, and especially for the long threads, it could be very hard to detect to the casual observer! Other robo-posts, however, were pretty obvious. I'm sure the technology will only get more sophisticated though, so hopefully we'll not lose sight of whose an actual person versus algorithmically produced and contributed content.

Be vigilant, (human) 986forum denizen! :)