The site counting all open tabs as online members is a pretty bad way of figuring out how many people are here.
I don't know about you all, but I constantly have around 10 chapo chat tabs open, especially when I first open the site to catch up on links.
The people confused about activity because of the hyper inflated "online" numbers with the dead slow posting rate are confused because we're reporting at least 5x the actual users online at any point.
We don't have 1700 people online, we have 300 with a few tabs open each.
The Video:
I opened around 150 tabs of Chapo.chat to test this after someone mentioned it to see if the site really did count users this way, then closed them all and watched the 1900 users drop to 1700. (Did this twice, recorded once.)
Also, petition for some kind of traffic page where we can see graphs of Chapo.chat activity over time?
I'd like to start doing outreach on Reddit and seeing actual metrics for it would be very motivating.
it's context based. so the frontpage is the total connection count. within a post, number of connections currently in that "room". same idea with community.