The Rebel Faction

<TABLE class=tborder cellSpacing=1 cellPadding=6 width="100%" align=center border=0><THEAD><TR><TD class=tcat colSpan=2>What's Going On?</TD></TR></THEAD><!-- logged-in users --><TBODY><TR><TD class=thead colSpan=2>[url="http://therebelfaction.com/forums/index.php?#top"][/url] [url="http://therebelfaction.com/forums/online.php?"]Currently Active Users[/url]: 17 (2 members and 15 guests) </TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE>


What's with all the guests? Did we get linked somewhere? Or did the search spiders find us already?

It's probably the Invisible mode feature that "allows you to browse the forums without appearing in the 'Currently Active Users' lists". It's likely that rather than displaying your name it just displays you as a guest if you have selected this option.

Aside from making it look like we have a jillion guests, I'm not sure exactly what the point of using Invisible Mode is. To make you feel sneaky?

Actually, most of them are probably troll bots from places such as Yahoo! or google.

It's Google. I noticed it earlier this morning.

Google sends its spiders to crawl the web every month or so, and does a deep crawl even less than that (I'm foggy on the exact numbers). It's basically a computer with its own IP address that follows every link it stumbles across. One of them found their way here.

In order to not break our server, it'll use multiple machines that will request pages every so often, that's why there are 15 guests. Fifteen different crawlers.

There's more information (more accurate information as well) as to how this works somewhere on Google's site.