I think the "anonymous users" at the bottom are ones who went through the first login page and clicked the "hide me" option (or is it unclick the "show me"...) when they log on.

The "guests" are different clients who are requesting pages but haven't logged in at all. I'm usually one of the guests, I think. I just click my tabbed bookmark and my browser pulls down about a dozen subforum pages at once in separate tabs, with message headlines sorted by recent activity. Then, I just skim the first page to see if something is new or active that I feel like reading, and start dismissing tabs until they are all gone. I guess I browse TV like the magazines in a waiting room, when I am waiting for my internet-based job to be interesting again.

When I actually find a thread to comment on, I click reply and it then asks me to login. After I post, I click logout and continue on my way. I am glad TV leaves the reply button visible, unlike some web forums where it is extremely inconvenient to read while logged out and then log in just to reply. If TV were like that, I'd probably never go through the trouble of posting.

Why do I do this? Probably because old habits die hard... The web right now reminds me of freshman year in college computer labs, where everyone got all excited and started spastically using the "finger" utility which showed who else was online in the data center, and the "write" or "talk" utilities to try to engage them interactively. After the novelty wore off, and people started to get creeped out by the "stalking" zeitgeist, many of us started changing our account settings to not accept write/talk requests and not appear online, and even lobbied the admins to disable it where we couldn't control it ourselves. Email became the preferred way to communicate, without caring whether the other person had a break between lectures at the same time you were in the lab.

I liked usenet and the old-fashioned web, and still like email because it is not presence-based but rather document-based. To me, the purpose is to read documents and write some once in a while, not to "be online" at the same time as others.

Besides, I have to stay true to my username...

OK... we've had 2 members own up so far... 

From the current Board Statistics:

432 user(s) active in the past 45 minutes

342 guests, 84 members 6 anonymous members 

Who are you?

And why do you hide?

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Lost Souls?