Just out of curiosity, is there any way to know the largest number of guests that has been on this forum at one time? From personal observation, the most I’ve seen at one time was around the release of WALL•E when there were about 120 guests online… But the average number every day is anywhere between 25 - 40 guests, from what I’ve noticed.
My theory that there are quite a steady number of guests because people find threads through search engines, since we have a pretty good rate of topics popping up there. Other times people just lurk and never get around to signing up. Well, that’s my theory.
My guess is people just browse this site to see what we are discussing about. For me, I can contribute to the guest number because when i am away from my computer, my internet is always on Pixar Planet.
Kinda off-topic, but i had a nightmare/theory about the large number of fuest. It was pretty scarey. The “guests” were bots trying to sign on Pixar Planet then post their garbage all over the place.
There is a high possibility that the large number of the guests are actually bots/spiders from various search engines. When you are the second most popular Pixar fansite according to Google (with The Pixar Blog being the most popular), you are bound to have bots crawling through the site at all times.
That said, there are most likely plenty of lurkers. I lurked here for months before joining, and I still lurked after I created an account
I haven’t a clue, but I bet that “Mell” would be able to give you a direct answer.
As for the extra guests who pop up on a daily/weekly basis, I agree with you guys in that many of them are probably lurkers, with the occasional “bot” or two. I also like to think that a small percentage of the visitors who browse this website are Pixarians. Perhaps a few of those people out of the 120 guests you noticed were Pixar employees looking to see what fans like us thought of their film (WALL-E), rachel. Heheh.
