About Our Forum Statistics

Overview

We recognize that a lot of forums on the Web boast huge stats about all the users that they have. The reality is that the stats are typically highly inaccurate. There are any number of reasons for this:

  1. Stats are not calculated realistically: The designers of the forum simply count all users as current users, whether or not they have an active account, have made a posting (ever), etc.
  2. They lie: Some forums just make up data that they feel might be valid or maybe will be valid in the future - it isn't actually based on database records or other real values. Sometimes this isn't done to be deceitful, but rather due to the complexity of retrieving and processing the data.
  3. Hacks: There are automated scripts running on the Internet as virus and active attacks by users that register accounts on forums for the sole purpose of being able to flood the forum with spam postings (such as advertisements) at a future date or to attempt to hack the forum software to gain personal user data. As a result, the forums become flooded with bogus user registrations. Knowbrainer.com forums receive typically 10 to 20 attempted bogus user registrations under these conditions daily.

The KnowBrainer forums operate very differently than many forums on the Internet. KnowBrainer takes automated security measures and active forum monitoring to ensure a safe environment for users, as well as to keep accurate statistics. These efforts include:

  1. Forced Enrollment Validation: When you enroll on the forums, you are required to send a valid e-mail address to which the forums automatically send an activation e-mail. The e-mail contains a link to a unique forum page that you must visit to activate the account. This eliminates automated, scripted attacks of bogus accounts on the forums.
  2. Domain Limitations: KnowBrainer automatically bans certain e-mail domains (e.g. "mail.ru") from the forum that are used by automated scripts to enroll bogus accounts for spam generation.
  3. Polled Updates: The forums automatically poll the current number of active users, enrolled users, active members, active quests, etc. every 10 minutes to record the latest stats.
  4. Stringent Security: Knowbrainer.com uses the same IT technology used by many payment processors to secure the site and your personal data stored on the site. Firewalls, intrusion detection and prevention systems, automated security scripts, manual log reviews, n-tiered networks, and 3DES encrypted data are just some of the efforts used to secure your data and provide a safe Web environment.

The statistics on the forums are updated every 10 minutes. All times & date specified are for the Eastern United States time zone (UTC/GMT -5:00 or -4:00 if daylight savings time is active). Dates are expressed in the US standard format of mm/dd/yyyy. Although the forums have been in place for several years, the current iteration of these forums have only been in place since September, 2006 and statistic tracking has only been active since August, 2007.

Definitions

Messages Posted - This is the total number of messages that have been posted by registered users on the forum since the current iteration of the forums went live in September, 2006. The previous KnowBrainer user forums are still online (read only) and contain an additional 37,549 posted messages and topics (combined).
Topics - Topics are the first (originating) message in a thread, the replies to the topic comprise the rest of the thread.
Active Users - These are users that have validated forum accounts (verified through confirmation e-mail) and have made at least one posting on the forum.
Max Concurrent Users - This is the total number of maximum users logged into the forums. This combines registered members as well as guests.
Max Concurrent Members - This is the maximum number of registered users (users with validated accounts) that were logged into the forum at a given point in time.
Max Concurrent Guests - This is the maximum number of guests (users viewing the site but not logged into a registered user account) that were viewing the site at a given point in time.