# More guests than members



## harlechjoe (23 Dec 2021)

The CycleChat forum is a great platform to hear the views of fellow cyclists that attracts a substantial number of views every day, the majority of whom are guests rather than members. I was wondering why guests aren't signing up to be members?


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## fossyant (23 Dec 2021)

Guests can be 'bots'.


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## Bike Tyson (23 Dec 2021)

What I want to know, who invites them?


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## oldwheels (23 Dec 2021)

A surprising number of people are a bit shy of putting their views forward in print. They prefer to just browse to see what others do.


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## PaulSB (23 Dec 2021)

harlechjoe said:


> The CycleChat forum is a great platform to hear the views of fellow cyclists that attracts a substantial number of views every day, the majority of whom are guests rather than members. I was wondering why guests aren't signing up to be members?


It's the same on many different forums, nothing unusual here.


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## Alex321 (23 Dec 2021)

I think it is true of most forums that guests far outnumber members.

In most forums, you only really need to join if you want to post. If you are just reading, you don't.

You will also have some who are accessing from a different computer who may be members, but who won't sign in on that occasion, so show up as guests.

And as mentioned above, many will actually be bots rather than real people.

I used to be a moderator on the Supercell forums (mobile games company), and the ratio of guests to members there was orders of magnitude more guests.


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## classic33 (23 Dec 2021)

fossyant said:


> Guests can be 'bots'.


Bots are listed seperately.


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## Alex321 (23 Dec 2021)

classic33 said:


> Bots are listed seperately.
> View attachment 623303


The ones that can be recognised - I suspect not all can. 

Though I must admit, I hadn't looked at that page, and didn't realise this forum even tried to separate bots from people.


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## Blue Hills (23 Dec 2021)

Apart from the bots I assume the guests are just folk content to partake of our collective wit wisdom and humanity but don't feel worthy.
The guests in the other place are a different story.


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## LCpl Boiled Egg (23 Dec 2021)

I browsed as a guest for quite a while before I registered - I think it was to ask a question that I couldn't find the answer to by browsing. Or it might have been because I wanted to comment on someone else's post, I'm not sure. It was a long time ago...


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## CanucksTraveller (23 Dec 2021)

Lots of people read fora and never want / need to sign up to participate. On this forum people will want to read (for example) what bike to buy, through how you do puncture repairs, to how to fit a gear cable. There's a lot of good instructional info in here. Some might just like reading all the accounts and stories of big rides, I know I do, and others might just like a mooch to see what's happening.

I've been a registered member on an aviation forum for something like 20 years now and I have a (pretty regular) read of the latest posts to see if there's anything interesting going on, and while I do still like reading it I've not actually logged in or posted in years now. It's pretty common to have more "voyeurs" than active participants.


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## IanSmithCSE (23 Dec 2021)

Good evening,

Certainly here guests are people who are not signed in, this includes members who are not signed in even if they signed in recently and have signed out again.

Some member sign in and stay signed in until the system signs them out, their browser clears cookies etc, other stay signed in only as long as needed to post a message.

Well behaved bots identify themselves, when you (in this context your browser) make an http request you can include _headers, _these are optional extras that were supposed to help the web server understand what was being asked for, one of these is the User-Agent

```
Search engines
Mozilla/5.0+(Linux;+Android+7.0;)+AppleWebKit/537.36+(KHTML,+like+Gecko)+Mobile+Safari/537.36+(compatible;+PetalBot;+https://webmaster.petalsearch.com/site/petalbot)

netEstate+NE+Crawler+(+http://www.website-datenbank.de/)

Real users
Mozlila/5.0+(Linux;+Android+7.0;+SM-G892A+Bulid/NRD90M;+wv)+AppleWebKit/537.36+(KHTML,+like+Gecko)+Version/4.0+Chrome/60.0.3112.107+Moblie+Safari/537.36

Mozilla/5.0+(Windows;+U;+Windows+NT+6.0;+en-US)+AppleWebKit/527++(KHTML,+like+Gecko,+Safari/419.3)+Arora/0.4+(Change:+)
```
This tells the web server what software will be used to display/process the result and

A web site may decide to send a response to a search engine that doesn't include sound and video as the search engine can't use them anyway
The Lynx browser is a text only browser so sending it a Flash element (when Flash was popular) would be pointless.
If there is Linux in the user-agent send one type of virus and another sort for Windows. :-)
As use of the internet became more and more deskilled and commercial pressures kicked in the user-agent header has become redundant in most situations, added to which lying in this header is common.

Taken from a real web site

```
Mozilla/5.0+(Windows+NT+10.0;+Win64;+x64)+AppleWebKit/537.36+(KHTML,+like+Gecko)+Chrome/89.0.4389.114+Safari/537.36
```
looks harmless but it was associated with requests to the web pages /blog/wp-includes/wlwmanifest.xml, /web/wp-includes/wlwmanifest.xml, /wordpress/wp-includes/wlwmanifest.xml which means that it was a malicious process looking to see if the site was based on Wordpress and then hopefully corrupt some key files.

Bye

Ian


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## tinywheels (24 Dec 2021)

harlechjoe said:


> The CycleChat forum is a great platform to hear the views of fellow cyclists that attracts a substantial number of views every day, the majority of whom are guests rather than members. I was wondering why guests aren't signing up to be members?


have you seen the state of the members?
mutual backslappers,serial underachievers and other assorted critters, living with hearts full of hate.
only those with nothing to live for,and no friends are to be found on the majority of forums.
Hell has a special slot for them ,it's a bigger and better lit place,not unlike your local jobcentre. staffed by dead eyed,pointy headed gargoyles,in hi viz jackets. who constantly move you around as unintelligible tannoy announcements spew out of the speakers..
the exit cannot be found, so like covid it will go on forever.


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## oldandslow (29 Dec 2021)

Completely normal for any Web site that requires sign ins. As stated above, quite a few "guests" may be members browsing, who may not sign in unless and until they want to post. Or people coming from search engines. And so on. Even in a newspaper, the number of people who turn first to the letters page will be far greater than the number who ever write to the editor, and only writing requires a sign-in, on any forum. If you do it any differently, and force sign-ins just to read, no-one ever finds the place, and it dies.

I've run various forums for work, and it's always the same, and nothing to worry about.


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