Guests online?

Are there really so many guests so often online? it keeps showing about 36 358 whenever i come here thats crazy amount hah.

I think the forums online list is held for 24 hours, so that would be the cumulative number of people in that time. Usually we see large bursts of guests when an article from the forum gets featured somewhere else.

when online.php actually worked, it was 2-3 days. However, someone's been messing with the code enough to break the page that lists online users.

from a quick look I see some users that show up as being online, but have not been on the forum in 2 days.

in comparison, most other sites use either 15 minutes, 1 hr. The laser projector forum uses 24hrs, if I'm not mistaken.