In the blurb to encourage guests to sign up, there's this line.
"In fact, there are 4,267 IT professionals currently interacting right now!"
Nope, not by a long shot.
I bet a lot of people think "Wow, must be a great place, I'm sure to get my question answered here in about 10 seconds for sure".
Later down the page, the truth is revealed.
"Currently Active Users: 4434 (57 members and 4377 guests)"
"Oh man, what a rip - only 57 actual people - wtf". Then they disappear never to be seen again.
"Guests" cannot be included, because they can't post. If they can't post, they can't interact.
Sure, some of them will sign up during the day, but the vast majority of them will either never post at all, or just post "Hi, I'm Fred Flintstone from Bedrock" in the introduce yourself forum.
Would you call the google web-crawler an IT professional - I wouldn't.
Of the 57 actual members in the list, how many are "professional" in the sense that they have an IT related job which pays them money? I see a lot of students employing a variety of reasons as to why they're too lazy to attempt their homework, but I sure wouldn't want to be working along side them.
The number of people currently logged on with >100 posts would be a far more realistic measure of the degree of expertese the site currently has available.
And not the number of open network connections, which seems to be what is being used at the moment.
