Total users online: 3 Members and 12633 Guests Online

I'm pretty sure most of the guests are bots/web spiders and other autonomous crawlers and things. I think mw0uzo increased the session time a while back to fix an issue where the session was timing out when writing long forum posts which will keep the number high. The guest numbers are not just for the forum, they are for the entire site, so any person, bot or other looking at any part of the website will contribute to the guest numbers.

There is no housekeeping to be done regarding this, and is just by design with Joomla and Kunena forum. It would be better if the (Joomla/Kunena) developers had done it as logged in users, (real) guests and bots, but they didn't, so it really is just what it is.

FSM19 wrote:

Does guests online include when conetnt is linked to websites, for example my own site displays the map and data from radmon? https://tocsin-bang.com/observationpost.html, the site iscurrently indergoing a re-build.

Generally not. If you are calling the radmon API via radmon.php  then no. The API runs along side Joomla so this shouldn't add to the guest count as the data isn't coming via Joomla. Things like displaying the CPM from radmon, displaying the map in an iframe ( radmon.org/osm.html ) or displaying the graphs from radmon on your website (radmon.org/UserGraphs/Simomax/graphtoday.png) should not add to the guest count as the data is coming from radmon core/API. However if any data is displayed on another website (whether in iframe or not) using radmon.org/index.php  then this will add to the guest count as the data is being processed by Joomla.

The number seems high, but I don't think it is wrong. There are literally thousands of web crawlers these days. Often they will send out an initial connection to see if there is any content there and then afterwards other servers/crawlers will be instructed to go and index the site. This can often be done using multiple machines and threads, each will be considered by Joomla as a separate connection/guest. On websites whose content often changes, such as forums, these crawlers will often connect back several times a day to check for changed/new content. Multiply that by the long session time (Joomla sees them as being connected for X hours) and it can soon add up to a hell of a lot of 'guests'. Google had about 2,500,000 servers online back in 2019 (they will have many more now with the availability of AI) but if we say that just 5% of them are for web crawling that makes 125,000 servers just for crawling. If each server has a thousand crawling threads, that makes 125,000,000 crawlers that can operate simultaneously. Then throw in to the equation Yahoo, Microsoft, OpenAI, and all the other 1000's of search engines, archive engines, anti-virus scanning engines etc and the numbers soon shoot up.

Yours and my PCs/browsers may also be creating guest connections at the same time we view radmon web pages due to things such as anti-virus programs, or tracking blockers and other things. I use Kaspersky AV and that integrates into my browser. When I load up a web page, Kaspersky also separately opens at least one connection to the web page to scan the code to ensure there are no nasties. There is a good chance that these AV programs also transmit back the URL to Kaspersky so they can keep it on a database of whether it is good or not. Then when other people go to the same web site using the same AV vendor it will cross reference the web page/site with the database and give a simple OK or not OK before loading the page. My point is, these programs create many more connections than we realize. Browser plug-ins and extensions will more than not do this too.

It is also important to know that 10 connections from the same IP/machine can count as 10 separate guests if their user-agent is different and all the programs, plug-ins and extensions will do just that in order to notify the host machine of who they are, if they are being good and not covert, posing as other things.

I would guess there being 10's, if not 100's of millions of crawlers operating on the net at any given time. Given the long session length of radmon these can connect, get a few kilobytes of data and then stay connected as far as Joomla is concerned, even though they have gone off to crawl else where. Then the same crawler can come back later with a slightly different user-agent, maybe appended with the current time or something and Joomla thinks the previous connection is still there (it's not, but it's session hasn't timed out yet) and sees the new connection as a new agent/user/guest.

I hope this adds some clarity for there being a zillion guests online at any time. They aren't users, maybe a handful are, but in the most just automated bots.