Does "went away" mean simply click to elsewhere online or logged out of the forum? If you simply click elsewhere, the forum has no way of knowing you've gone away and has to guess whether or not you're reading, writing, or have gone away and are looking for
something different for lunch. I suspect reply #1 was made during that "guess he may still be here" period.
I mean I closed that tab and went elsewhere webwise without logging out. I've got it set to automatically log me in or never log me out or whatever (saves remembering the password
). Does that count me as being still logged in even when the forum isn't open? I'd never thought of it! Anyway, if so, that would explain it. Thanks.
Yes, you're still counted as being here ... one of the conundrums of analysing web server logs is that they contain data about when a page was displayed on your browser, but not when you took it down. So if I analyse a log file showing 5 different pages visited ... with intervals of (say) 30 seconds, 25 seconds, 60 seconds and 5 seconds between them, I know your visit lasted at least two minutes - but whether you move straight away from the 5th page when you realised it won't what you wanted, or stopped there for half an hour carefully reading it comes mostly down to guesswork.
As a re-assurance, I very very rarely look closely at visits unless something really strange gets flagged up. I think I mentioned the 6000 page requests in an hour a couple of months back.
