• Responding to email notices you receive.
    **************************************************
    In short, DON'T! Email notices are to ONLY alert you of a reply to your private message or your ad on this site. Replying to the email just wastes your time as it goes NOWHERE, and probably pisses off the person you thought you replied to when they think you just ignored them. So instead of complaining to me about your messages not being replied to from this site via email, please READ that email notice that plainly states what you need to do in order to reply to who you are trying to converse with.

  • IMPORTANT! PLEASE READ!! About the Google Adsense ads being displayed

    =====================
    Posted 08/15/2025
    =====================


    Yeah, I know. They are a pain in the butt. But they pay the bills to keep my server running. Just a fact of life, I am afraid.

    Want to get rid of them? Simple. Just become a Contributor level member or above and they will be gone. -> Please click HERE."

    Is that too much for me to ask of you to keep this site running? Well, sorry about that. I too wish I could get everything for free. But alas.....

    =====================
    Addendum: 01/10/2026
    =====================


    Google Adsense ad revenue for December, 2025 was just $30 over the cost of the lease for the server running this site. So, in effect, the money providing the incentive for me to continue running this site is coming SOLELY from the paid memberships and sponsorships here. Which honestly ain't much....

Guests?

WebSlave

WebSlave

It is what it is, but certainly not what it was.
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Anyone noticed the HUGE number of guests online today? Hit around 1500 at one point. Wonder what is going on? :shrug01: :shrug01:
 
I always see a lot of "guests". Sometimes I think they are real guests and some I believe are members just not wanting to show they are actually on here.

Either way it is cool that more and more people seem to be coming on. I have also noticed some newer people registering.
Do you keep tabs on that?
 
I also noticed that the time someone goes off here and it actually shows they are off is set high. Maybe 1/2 hour or 45 mins?
So there are times when it looks like people are on that have actually gotten off awhile ago.
 
Rich,

I suspect that they may be search engine spiders. Sometimes yahoo will bombard a site. Are you able to tell?
 
Ken Harbart said:
Jim hit the nail on the head. The culprit is probably Yahoo, as they have been discovered to be responsible for this on a few sites that I'm aware of. Their spiders show up as a new guest each time a page is crawled.

http://www.glocktalk.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=715469
Click to expand...

Very well could be. You just switched over servers and the spiders see this as new blood. ATTACK!!!
 
Well heck, I like that better than thinking it was a bunch of people who didn't want to either register or login here. The more spiders the better to get this site indexed and rated in the search engines.

Bring it on, arachnids!!
 
WebSlave said:
Well heck, I like that better than thinking it was a bunch of people who didn't want to either register or login here. The more spiders the better to get this site indexed and rated in the search engines.

Bring it on, arachnids!!
Click to expand...
the thing is, it only takes one Google spider and one MSN spider to crawl the site and gather all of the necessary information to list you on search engines, but Yahoo feels that it needs hundreds at a time.....it's rediculous..and i'm pretty sure it costs you bandwidth.

I looked on those glock forums and everyone was talking about how slow it was when the spiders were on..
 
Well with this new server, bandwidth really shouldn't be an issue. At least not for a while. Kind of makes me think maybe the old server had issues blocking some spiders, and perhaps other visitors as well. I know I had many instances of what seemed like a rolling black out, where I could just not get in for about a minute or so, and then shazam, things were back to normal.

I'll be curious to see how the guest numbers change over the next few days....
 
Stardust said:
I also noticed that the time someone goes off here and it actually shows they are off is set high. Maybe 1/2 hour or 45 mins?
So there are times when it looks like people are on that have actually gotten off awhile ago.
Click to expand...
Roz, I've noticed that, too. If they just close out the window, it doesn't show them as gone for a while....BUT, if they log out, they are gone (who logs out, though?)
 
That's a vBulletin setting. It's up to the admin how long to show a user as "active" after their last page request.
 
Jim O said:
That's a vBulletin setting. It's up to the admin how long to show a user as "active" after their last page request.
Click to expand...

That is correct. Unfortunately that very same setting also controls how long an unread thread will be marked as such in the forums. So making that setting too short, will cause some threads to timeout and be marked as being "read" while you are still reading others on the site. So I tried to strike a balance that seemed reasonable.
 
WebSlave said:
That is correct. Unfortunately that very same setting also controls how long an unread thread will be marked as such in the forums. So making that setting too short, will cause some threads to timeout and be marked as being "read" while you are still reading others on the site. So I tried to strike a balance that seemed reasonable.
Click to expand...
I believe they are, or can be, separately set in later versions, though I'm not 100% sure.
 
Yeah, maybe. I've got some sites running the latest (or close to it) version of vBulletin, but don't remember seeing those options separated. Maybe because I just wasn't thinking of looking for it, perhaps.

This site is definitely overdue for an upgrade, but that isn't going to happen until maybe this upcoming Winter. I certainly don't need that particular headache right now. Plus I'm sure it is going to cost me an arm and a leg. I think then will be the time to consider which custom mods done over the past can be done away with completely and save me some money on the upgrade coding of those mods.
 
WebSlave said:
Yeah, maybe. I've got some sites running the latest (or close to it) version of vBulletin, but don't remember seeing those options separated. Maybe because I just wasn't thinking of looking for it, perhaps.

This site is definitely overdue for an upgrade, but that isn't going to happen until maybe this upcoming Winter. I certainly don't need that particular headache right now. Plus I'm sure it is going to cost me an arm and a leg. I think then will be the time to consider which custom mods done over the past can be done away with completely and save me some money on the upgrade coding of those mods.
Click to expand...
I looked it up. I wasn't available before 3.5. Now it's an option under "General Settings...Thread/Forum Read Marking Type" under which you can choose inactivity/cookie based like this is, or actually by database tracking (there are two different settings options for this). I'm not sure how much processor load there is on this large a forum from the database marking system but I imagine it may be significant.
 
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