Size of the HP Community

[redglyph]

(08-29-2022 07:36 AM)Thomas Klemm Wrote:  I have the impression that even old threads are constantly getting new views from crawlers.
So maybe we should ignore them.

Aren't bots known? Or is it possible to test for any access to /robots.txt in order to discard them?

But anyway the problem is that many IPs are dynamic, so counting the anonymous visitors will overestimate, even after discarding bot accesses. Some of those anonymous accesses may also be from members checking in from work on from another computer without being logged in (though it's possibly negligible?).

At best, the number of anonymous accesses, taken by periods of maybe 15-30 days (reasonable lease time of dynamic IPs) would give an upper bound when added to registered users who accessed the site recently.

There are other sites as mentioned earlier but cross-referencing IPs would be hard to do, and (I think) likely not legal.


Another way of knowing would be to sell an HP-41 on eBay and see the number of views