Best Traceroute!

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Lurker count

I wonder how much the "1968 reads" on this post overestimates the number of lurkers we still have. I've now read it twice (update: several more times now to verify that it's going up each time I click). I'd guess most people wouldn't revisit it since it hasn't yet had replies. Does this count include a significant number of automated crawlers?

Lurker count low

Currently the count sits at 2237, over 15 days. That's 149 views/day.
Previously it was 1968 reads over 13 days = 151 views/day. I noticed there wasn't really a bump in traffic from my post, either. It looks like there is just a steady trickle of readers, which seems to indicate not many real human readers.

Top of the list

It's been top of the active form topics list a lot recently. Judging by the number of active posters, and multiplying by 10-20 to estimate the number of lurkers would put the active readership somewhere in the 200-500 range.

I would guess it gets spidered about 50 times a day (based on the update frequency of spiders from Baidu, Google and Bing) and about 100 people a day (20%) click it to check "how can that be an active forum topic?".

Aggregators may also skew the count

I subscribe to the comments feed via Feedly, for example. It may be impossible to determine how much "reads" are both magnified by repeated hits from aggregators and diminished by their rebroadcast.

Did anyone try it?

That traceroute actually worked, well, for the first fifty ip-addresses, on my box. ;)