• 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....

Indeed, just what IS going on?

WebSlave

WebSlave

It is what it is, but certainly not what it was.
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I glanced at the What's Going On display a few moments ago, and saw that we had 81 registered members and 750 guests logged on. Now this has been happening pretty frequently lately, and although I am used to seeing twice the number of guests as registered members, this HUGE gulf between registered members and unregistered visitors or logged out members REALLY baffles me. I know this site gets visited a lot by search engine spiders, but this is ridiculous. Has this site become a case study for Lurkers Anonymous or something? :shrug01:
 

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Maybe it is just a bunch of the exposed bad guys coming to see if their latest scams have been reported yet. I mean how many bad guys have been exposed over the years? With more and more exposed every month, you know they come here and lurk. :)
 
I noticed that last night while cruising the cornsnake forum. I was curious as to why their are so many unregistered individuals online all at the same time!
 
I confess. I don't always log in when I'm looking around Fauna.

Two reasons:

1. If I just want to check something quick, I go and find it without logging in. That way, when I have more time to read through things, the "New Posts" search shows everything that I missed since the last time I was actually logged in.

2. Sometimes I just don't want people to know that I'm home.


I have noticed though that there seems to be a LOT of unregistered "lurkers" browsing the forum-based classifieds lately. It's usually those people who register just to make one post to an add that is over a year old, too.
 
...but I did just notice that we just hit 28,000 members!
 

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Hmm, interesting. 160 unregistered users browsing the photo gallery right now.

The last three days we had over 10,000 unique IP addresses each day visit this site. Approximately 45,000 raw hits per day as well. But only roughly 1,200 registered members per day. That's one heck of a lot of lurkers here!

Hah! For one day I should set this site so that only registered members can read ANYTHING here and see what happens then.... :reddevil:

Of course, over the last month we have had a low of 25 and a high of 52 NEW registered members each day. So maybe I shouldn't mess with a good thing.............. :>poke2<:
 
WebSlave said:
Hmm, interesting. 160 unregistered users browsing the photo gallery right now.

The last three days we had over 10,000 unique IP addresses each day visit this site. Approximately 45,000 raw hits per day as well. But only roughly 1,200 registered members per day. That's one heck of a lot of lurkers here!

Hah! For one day I should set this site so that only registered members can read ANYTHING here and see what happens then.... :reddevil:

Of course, over the last month we have had a low of 25 and a high of 52 NEW registered members each day. So maybe I shouldn't mess with a good thing.............. :>poke2<:
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It could be they are checking things out before registering also. Just think, today's lurkers are tomorrow's Contributor level members! :eatsmiley
 
I will stop in once and awhile to check things out when I'm on break at work, but I usually am looking for something specific while I am here. So, like Paul said, I don't log in then, so when I get home in the morning I can see all of the "new posts" come up when I almost have time to sit down and read them.
 
Another site I belong to (non herp related) had these numbers, when I was browsing there the past two days.
40,000+ members
registered 44 guests 729
registered 58 guests 750
based on those numbers, the signed on members ratio is actually higher here, than at the other site. It's only two days, so definitely not a "scientific study" still interesting.
 
Heck, I have no idea about the disparity between logged in members and visitors. The below snapshot I took not only because of the almost 50/50 ratio, but for the TOTAL numbers of members and posts as well (this is from corvetteforum.com, btw):
 

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Those are some serious numbers in that last one. Imagine having to run that.

I always log in because it annoys me if I want to reply to something I read, and have to stop and sign in first. Messes with the moment.
 
Yeah, it would take some serious hardware to run a site like that without major lags in response time. But they have a TON of advertisers, so I am sure money isn't a problem for them.
 
One of these days I am going to try an experiment to just see what happens. What I am going to do is to make this entire site so that ONLY registered and logged in members can view it. I have to admit that I am REALLY curious to see what would happen... :reddevil:
 
i know i always lurk for a couple weeks on any forum i'm thinking of joining . this is mainly to see if its going to be one i actually do want to join . i like to get a feel for a site before i decide for sure one way or the other . just my 2 cents .
 
I check the site from work - I am signed in on the two terminals I use regularly, but if I access the internet from anywhere else I am not (and don't bother to unless I post). So I be part of the problem, lol
 
I just wonder how many of those IP addresses I see logged in as "guests" are actually search engine spiders? Not that it would be a bad thing, because it means that this site is being heavily indexed in the search engines. I just wonder how many REAL people are viewing this site. The newer version of vBulletin has the capability of displaying recognized search engine IP addresses, but this version does not. It cost me over $1K to have this site upgraded last time, so I'm not about to do that until it is absolutely necessary to do so, and just to see spider IP addresses isn't all that overwhelmingly necessary to me.

BTW, if anyone out there is wondering why I am keeping those real old ads in the classifieds forums, let me tell you that I have noticed that those old ads are STILL pulling in new viewers every day who see them in the search engine listings. Yeah, maybe the ad IS old and the stuff is not longer available, but you can bet that someone coming onto this site via that manner is certainly going to look around while he/she is here. So those people with currently active ads are certainly going to benefit from those older ads still being here.
 
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