Just Curious

[Darice]

I notice that line at the bottom of the page about "currently active users" and it's interesting to me that there are usually many more "guests" online than "members." But I don't think I have ever seen more than 30 online. And then there's the note:

"Most users ever online was 126, Sun Jan 9, 2001 at 11:03 AM."

So, was there something going on then to spike interest?

[Neil Cuadra]

Good question!

Number of Currently Active Users

Since site visitors can read the forums without registering it's common for there to be many "guest" users in the forums. That includes anyone with a bone marrow failure disease who wants to read the forums but doesn't (yet) want to register and make their own posts. The "guest" count also includes search engines like Google and Bing that scan Marrowforums to update their indexes. There are typically a couple of these search engines visiting Marrowforums at any given time.

Most users ever online

Sometimes there's a surge in traffic just by random chance but other times we know what caused a wave of new visitors and new forum members.

The record-setting surge on January 9, 2011 resulted from Marrowforums being mentioned in the January 2011 issue of The MDS Connection (a publication of the Aplastic Anemia & MDS International Foundation).

Marrowforums was also mentioned in the March 2010 issue of the eInsider newsletter, the June 2011 issue of AA&MDSIF INSIDER, and the November 2011 issue of The MDS Connection.

Finally, there's a link to Marrowforums in the footer of each issue of eInsider, which brings people to Marrowforums on a regular basis.