I just checked out that old hive of liberalism, and found that they have 5,500 members, but only 5 members online. They also supposedly have 213 guests. Apparently there's a lot of dead weight in their member database.

But considering the ratio, I'm guessing a lot of those "guests" are individual search engine bots. If they had that many people, more of them would be logged in. Look at the ratio on CathInfo:

39 forum users (13 members, 26 guests)

It's about 1:2. My software strips out the search engine bots (and identifies them), rather than counting them in with the guests.

I can't believe, though, that even though Vox Clamantis (Tracy) has gone with the strategy of trying to become the next Catholic Answers (more liberal, with nothing left to make Trads look anything other than mainstream), CathInfo actually has more traffic!

I mean, that forum's been around longer than CathInfo. And they SHOULD have "quantity" since they appeal to all the Indult fans, Novus Ordo conservatives, non-Catholics, etc. -- certainly a larger pond to draw from.

Incidentally, the latest CathInfo member is member #5005. The difference between the current member number (5005) and the "number of CathInfo members" (3012) is about 2,000 members that I purged from the database a while ago. I probably won't do it again anytime soon, because there's no real incentive for a forum to have a lean, mean member database unless you're renting your software, have a member limit, or something like that.