Why are there so many lurkers?

[ApostateAbe]

I am seeing at least as many lurkers as regulars viewing the forums, and sometimes twice as many. Does this forum get a lot of publicity?

[Corona688]

I am seeing at least as many lurkers as regulars viewing the forums, and sometimes twice as many. Does this forum get a lot of publicity? That they even can lurk like that is somewhat unusual, even most open boards have several key areas that cannot be viewed unless logged on. Also remember that 'lurkers' may be ordinary users that have not logged on. I do that sometimes on foreign computers.

[livius drusus]

If you look at the Who's Online list, you can get an idea of how many of those lurkers are actually people and how many are search engine spiders. Usually there are considerably more of the latter. This is the case on any public board, but many of them -- like IIDB for instance -- have it set so the crawlers are unidentified.