Discrepancies with Earners Forum and WF

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Deliguy

Deliguy

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Sep 27, 2006
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Okay so me and Jon were talking, which usually ends badly, but he pointed out that WF current has 139 active users at the moment. He also mentioned that Earnersforum cheats their stats.

Of course theres that mod that allows you to easily do that but I never thought a big forum like EF would need to. but upon closer inspection I think he's fuckin right.

Check out these few discrepancies:
Current it says there are 290 active users. Oddly enough most are guests, which is weird for this hour.
Earners Forum
Currently Active Users: 290 (25 members and 265 guests)

But if you add up all the "Current Viewing" it doesn't even come close to match. Of course this count refers to users that click on the forum topic and haven't clicked anywhere else yet. So in order to be an "idle member" they have to either click the link to the main forum after clicking on a forum topic or they have to be in their User CP or private messages. So there will be a small difference between the two numbers. However EarnersForum currently has a HUGE difference.
Adding up all the "Currently Viewing" comes with 151 actual people. Thats a discrepancy of 139 fuckin people. With only a 52% match.


Just for the sake of comparison check out Wickedfire at the moment:
Currently Active Users: 139 (41 members and 98 guests)
118 viewing - 84% match
Thats a difference of only 21 people, which makes a hell of a lot more sense.

Naturally the difference will get bigger the larger the forum is, right? Check out Digital Point right now:
Currently Active Users: 1,078 (332 members and 746 guests)
914 viewing - 84% match
Thats a difference of only 164, barely more than EF with three times the people.

Okay so maybe the layout is fucking with the numbers. Lets look at Sitepoint which has, lets face it, the exact same damn layout.
Currently Active Users: 1373 (251 members and 1122 guests)
1095 viewing - 80% match
Once again far higher percentage

I'll be honest I always kind of thought jon was talkin out his ass in the past when he was ranting about lee cheating to make his forums look bigger than they are. Just because I thought lee didn't need to. Looking at this I'm starting to believe. Makes me wonder how many forums lee has sold while lieing about the member counts and true board activity.
 


I think it's time for a good 'ol fashioned..

waterpwnedkj5.jpg
 
This is retarded. There's no getting around it, even if you are a mod, this is a retarded and a lame ass post.

First, who fucking cares? I don't. Even if I owned WF, I wouldn't fucking care. Most non-retarded people realize the value is in active members, not fucking guests.

Second, ever heard of a fucking search engine spider? You know, those things that crawl the web for search engines? Yeah, they count as guests. At any time, google (as an example) can send a shitload of bots to one site for a deep crawl from many different IPs at once. They FLY through the pages so they won't show up in your post counts.

Third, the amount of time you just spent doing this? Seriously, wtf. You have nothing better to do?

Eli, you own bluehatseo right? Seriously. You could have saved a lot of time had you thought about #2 above which is blatantly obvious to me.
 
ScottDaMan said:
Second, ever heard of a fucking search engine spider? You know, those things that crawl the web for search engines? Yeah, they count as guests. At any time, google (as an example) can send a shitload of bots to one site for a deep crawl from many different IPs at once. They FLY through the pages so they won't show up in your post counts..
Click to expand...

I may not know much 'bout them fancy search engine machines but I was under the impression they crawled sites. So I would reckon they'd be in the post topics as well. Therefore the ratio would stay essentially the same. If not lean them more towards the positive :)

You're right though big waste of time :rasta:

Don't ever buy a forum from Lee.
Today's lesson was brought to you by the letter E.
 
nah, from my experience, bots are all over the fucking place on a forum, not just threads. There are in profiles, top lists, and fly through the forums (I'm talking seconds).

Unless you are crawling the site within seconds to get data, you will miss a lot.

Tell you what, waste more time and do this three or four times at various times in the day. Let's see if it is bots or really skewed results by EF.

Like I said, I could care less, I have better things to do then brag about my earnings on some fucking forum.
 
ScottDaMan said:
Tell you what, waste more time and do this three or four times at various times in the day. Let's see if it is bots or really skewed results by EF.
Click to expand...

I'll do you one better. I'll write a quick script to do it for me. :)

I've been meaning to get into the forum business again. Testing, statistical analysis of commons, and finding skewed and cheated results is always a welcome waste of time in my research process.

Perhaps if I include enough standardized forums from enough niches I can identify which types of layouts and designs work best for keeping people inside the forum topics (where I want them)? Ever wonder which performs better, the Sitepoint/EF style where the forum is a subpage to quality content and highlighted discussions on the index or Wickedfire style where the forum is the forefront on the index?

I'm kind of curious myself.

And don't worry I have no intentions of bragging or even talking about my earnings anytime soon. :)
 
If I have a weakness, its the unwillingness to learn PHP (or any programming lang). No such thing as a quick script for me.

Oh well, I keep the overseas partners happy.
 
ScottDaMan said:
If I have a weakness, its the unwillingness to learn PHP (or any programming lang). No such thing as a quick script for me.

Oh well, I keep the overseas partners happy.
Click to expand...

Allow me to share a deeply guarded secret on how to learn programming and automation super fast and easy. After all even if you have other people to do it for you, its still very much part of your business and I'm a firm believer in knowing every aspect of your business.

Grab and print out a bunch of tutorials ranging from beginner to advanced. Or buy a book. I own the books but personally like the tutorials cus they give different perspectives on proper coding structure. <- thats not the tip though

Then insert Asian porn pictures into the end of every chapter. I'm not joking, if you go to my office and you open up all our programming books and tutorial and reference binders at the end of every chapter will be asian porn. That even goes for the cisco certification books and manuals.

Then grab a beer and one of the books/binders and chill outside with some smokes and start reading.
 
Great post Eli... I know some big "whitehat" guys that fudge, fraud, fake and straight spam. I'm not going to mention names but just cause someone portrays themselves to the public as one thing doesn't mean that's who they really are.

Scott you need to take a chill pill. This forum is about education in my opinion. And well I think Eli's post was VERY educational, he didn't just make a fictitious claim like some of the airbrushed Adsense a lot of guys do. He actually had done his homework with hard facts and figures to back it up. Also he was the first to say this isn't 100% conclusive and needed some more testing for verification. But he has a very valid point.

But besides all that what's important is the details he's looking for and points he's proving things on. As these are great from a research level. Or if you wanted to make your own forum and fake traffic like Dodd is doing be smarter about it. Don't use some store bought app that's going to profile all your bunk users.
 
Never, ever, take the CHILL PILL... your ideas will die!

But seriously, you can't say my points aren't valid. I've seen google, yahoo, and MSN add 100 people to my guest list before on a different forum I own (nothing like this recently though). I know what I am talking about from my own experiences.

The fact of the matter is, guest visitors cannot be trusted on any forum, whether tampered or not. You need to go by actual regged users since THEY are the ones who make or break a forum.

Is what he said possible? Perhaps, but not without further checking. Even then, some spiders love certain sites and visit all the damn time.
 
Although tough to believe that earners outperforms the two larger forums with their crawlstats...Scott definitely does have a point. Perhaps we should look at strictly the ratio of registered users to the current viewers within the forum topics. Here's how the new percentages breaks down using strictly the registered users. By all theory of the data the more spiders currently on the site being listed as guests should bring the percentage down.

Wickedfire: 288%
Digital Point: 275%
Sitepoint: 436%
Earners: 604%

Notice anything odd?
 
I don't know if this would make any difference but could it be because they show active users within a different timeframe in VB, this is an option with the software i think as ive heard Digitalpoint say he shows all users active within 15 minutes but sitepoint i believe show active users within an hour, don't know what WF and EF use.
 
A-D said:
I don't know if this would make any difference but could it be because they show active users within a different timeframe in VB, this is an option with the software i think as ive heard Digitalpoint say he shows all users active within 15 minutes but sitepoint i believe show active users within an hour, don't know what WF and EF use.
Click to expand...
EF does within the last 24h
 
A-D said:
I don't know if this would make any difference but could it be because they show active users within a different timeframe in VB, this is an option with the software i think as ive heard Digitalpoint say he shows all users active within 15 minutes but sitepoint i believe show active users within an hour, don't know what WF and EF use.
Click to expand...

Yes, it definitely makes a difference. On my vbulletin forum, I have it set for 20 minutes. If I change the time to 40 minutes it makes it look like there are double the amount of people on. Unless you can see the who's online section, you can't tell what each guest is doing and when their last activity is.

At any given time, I have 50 Yahoo spiders on my forum. They don't always count in the forums themselves because they search profiles, images, and really weird URLs (part of that has to do with Zoints I have installed).
 
Also, if they let any spider in without blocking any....they could have a huge amount of spiders on. The only real reason for doing that would be to inflate stats though, because most people block the crappy spiders. They don't do much besides use bandwidth.
 
Did I hear anyone say -- longer cookie time in vbulletin? Back in 2003 I used to run a semi-popular forum and one of the things which I did was to take the cookie time to 1 hour from default 15 minutes. Because of this, people seemed to stay login and "active" for one hour rather than default 15 minutes. That might be one reason...
 
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