How many members are online at one time?
Who knows? They aren’t on any schedule, and there’s no timeclock to check in on.
Any board Admin knows. It’s trivial to check. It’s something that the vast majority of message boards display on their front page but it’s hidden here.
400 members on right now. 2,000+ guests right now!!! That blows my mind.
The low point of the week would be very early Sunday morning, say 6-7AM. I think I looked recently and saw 200 or so. Maybe a bit less.
I have no doubt that, during a weekday noon or so, perhaps 700-1200. I could be way off as I’m not around much during the U.S. day.
samclem, do you know if it doubles up on people signing in?
For example, on other forums I’ve been on, if you come to the board and then sign in you’ll count as a guest (for a few minutes) and a signed in member.
Edit: It doesn’t even matter. Even if it was doubling up every, single member there’d still be 1,400 guests left.
I typically mail copies of my manual monthly log of sites visited to the central clearing house where they type in the data in batch, cross check it, add check sums, store on microfiche and file it away in cardboard boxes in the basement.
That is how most data is tracked on the internet, right?
I just got back to this thread and realized I had read the title wrong-I thought Qin Shi Huangdi had asked how many moderators were on at any one time.
My bad.
Years ago I suggested they show it. This was back when we were having a lot of server problems. My thought was that after a few days/weeks, users would get a feel for how many people had to be on before there was a problem and the peak times would flatten a bit. I still think it would be helpful. If I surfed over to the SDMB and saw that the load meter was higher then a certain number of people and I was likely to have slowdowns, I’d probably just come back a little later. I think a lot of people would.
ETA, I just looked at the thread where I asked about it. I asked for a load meter, TubaDiva, acting as a Board Admin, told me if the website is timing out, that means there are too many people online. How helpful of her.
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=117541&
Ah, that makes a lot more sense. Guess I can quit sending in my monthly logs now.
Of course. You did use form SD0007/3g and file it in triplicate, with the canary copy going to Accounting, didn’t you?
. . . and with that he awoke from his dystopian nightmare. :eek:
At the bottom of the main SDMB page there are board stats like number of threads, number of posts, number of members, and number of active members. I assume that is what the OP is looking for?
No, active members refers to the number of people who have logged in at any time in the past 30-90 days. The OP is asking for the number of people who are online at any given time. It’s displayed on some vBulletin sites, but off on this one.
I just noticed a “blankout” for SDMB at about 8:03PM CST to 8:07. When my browser couldn’t connect to this one site, but everything else was working (FTP chugging along in the background, etc.) I tried pinging straightdope.com and it timed out several times. I could ping everything else in the world just fine.
So did Chicago go down for five minutes Saturday nite, or did we just exceed some limits?
I’ve got the previously infamous “database error” screen a couple/three times in the last week; I think we’ve got full database problems again.
This error seemed different. Previously, I could ping straightdope.com, and Cecil’s page was OK, but the boards weren’t responding. This time I couldn’t even ping the main site. That’s quite different from a SQL database error, which wouldn’t affect a ping.
If you can’t get a ping response, you can’t even get a “database error” message.
In fact, I did not get the error screen on this evening’s short outage. So perhaps you’re right. I certainly didn’t bother to ping. I just went to yahoo to get the college football scores instead. 
Ed announced that straightdope.com (the Cecil columns website) would be down between roughly 7 and 8. Though he said it shouldn’t affect the SDMB, it is in point of fact a subdomain of straightdope.com; I’m wondering if there might have been an unexpected carryover when th main domain was taken down for maintenance.