Must Login

[Cynthia]

We are trying out a must login approach. Viewing of our forum is not open to guests. So the question has arisen as to why Who's Online still shows a large number of guests. Is this correct:

Also, after you login and read a page, if you open other MDC forums/threads in a different window, each additional window you have open to a thread at MDC, shows up in Who's Online as a 'guest' viewing that page. So if I'm posting on this thread, while having one window open in a forum and another window open in another forum who's online will show me as posting a reply, plus a 'guest' viewing another forum, and another 'guest' viewing another forum.

[Wayne Luke]

If a person is logged in, they will not show up as a Guest in multiple browser windows. They would reuse the session that was assigned to them and only be counted as logged in once. Guests showing up are those people who have not logged in and search engine bots. They are looking at a "No Permission" screen if you have your permissions set correctly.

When bots like Google or Slurp visit your site, they can easily generate hundreds of sessions as multiple bots try to index your site. You can limit most well behaved bots but using a robots.tct file. There should be instructions in the webmaster sections on each search engine site that describe how to set this up for their bots.