The "Who's Online" tracker on the front page is a crude measure of who's viewing the site.  It does not discriminate between viewers like you and the plethora of automated spidering engines/programs running around on the web.

Causes of "bogus" site traffic

• Some of these spidering engines are essential for the proper functioning of the World Wide Web: organizations such as Google and Yahoo interact with out site in order to populate their search engines.
• Other traffic is less benign: one of the ways that spammers obtain email addresses is by harvesting them from websites with their own spiders.  (We hope our site is immune from these attempts, but we'll keep watching!)
• Occasionally attempts just appear to be people practising their programming skills and forgetting to put the brakes on their spider engines, getting them caught up ion an endlessly recursive loop.
• A new source of unwanted traffic appears to come from a new breed of anti-malware defence pioneered by Grisoft (AVG) - when coming to our site from the major search engines their software (AVG 8 and above), if you have it installed, takes a peek at our site checking for malware before letting you on.  This registers yet another "bogus" guest for each real one.

When you consider that some of these spidering engines launch multiple simultaneous connections (sometimes 20-30) it is little wonder that we appear to have many more guests online than we really have!

We do from time to time publish more accurate statistics (Web Analytics) that are collected by Google Analytics.