About who is logged in....

This is one of many questions about the c-verse I've often wondered about but never had the motivation to ask. If I log in and then minimize the SSJ screen and go elsewhere-I'm usually logged in about 4 sites-will someone coming here see me as logged in? Is there any time limit on it?

I ask this now as I think if we want to make this site a success we should try and avoid others passing us by because the lights are out. I've seen improvement on this owing to a few staying logged in, but it would be quite helpful to have a few others showing guests they haven't stumbled onto a ghost ship. There is a site called MindRomp that was started by a few-mostly from TalkRational-mafia affectionados. They average about the same number of members online as does A+, 10- yet I know often none are actually reading the site but busy elsewhere.

Yes, I've won awards for stating the bloody obvious, b4 you ask. My question is about the mechanics. It is my assumption that as long as I am online once I log in here it continues show me as logged in to others without any kind of activity by me. If this is wrong, please let me know. My other question is why we can't get more to do so and help things get started here. Seems a pretty minimal effort for the cause to me if my take on how things work is accurate. So little I understand about the complexities of cyber-reality. I probably should be using a Yerkish terminal.

Minimizing the web page but otherwise not interacting with the site would, in general, not keep you on the rooster of logged in users. So whatever the session timeout is (5 minutes?) would apply even if the page is minimized. There are steps that a website can do to keep a session alive while the page is minimized that involve JavaScript events and AJAX. But I don't believe phpbb sites actually do this.

The number of members currently on the site is actually a count of people who have requested a page view in the last hour. This means that having the page open will not be enough. In order to maintain a presence in this sense - you need to view a thread once ever hour or so. It's a measure of lurkers.

However I think regular posts are the best way to attract new members. From that perspective you're definitely doing your bit. Keep it up! I'm going to do some archival of some old threads this weekend and potentially do some search engine optimization.

Do we have anyone here who is arty? We could use a logo.

Edit- Scott was getting ready to post at the same time as me. But he's essentially right.

Thanks for the answer guys. Glad I thought to ask. No biggie to check in every hour or so; 5 minutes would have been a problem. Think it's worth the effort though, and I'll try and post more. It's not really in my comfort zone havig a large profile but sacrifices must be made and I plenty of unanswered questions.