well i did have 33 guests online (none that registered)
I'd say its a good thing to have as many guests viewing your forum because it shows others that its very interesting
At most I've had between 10 and 15 guests browsing my forums -- mostly bots though. On a regular basis, I see about 5 or 6 guests browsing the forums. Any extra views to your forum is good. 🙂
At one point I had a forum and was trying to get a friend to join. He claimed the lack of traffic (at that point we only had a few dedicated members) put him off. I tossed a few thousand guests to the site from one of those Traffic Exchanges, all at once 😛
Guests are only a negative thing if you have an extremely small hosting package and they are using up your monthly bandwidth. Otherwise they are only positive.
They say that guests click on more ads than members, because the members are more involved with the content on the site. So lots of guests could be good for your forum revenue.
Leo Ghost, be careful with those traffic exchanges, if you have ads from an ad network on your site. Some of them don't allow their ads to be shown on sites with that kind of traffic, and may ban your site.
I like having guests, it shows me whether I've been doing a good job promoting or not. If I see I have less guests in the past 24 hours than usual, I know I'm not promoting enough. I just wish the guests would take the jump and register.
My forum is almost 8 months old and we can go from having 5 guest to around 50 (we don't use any form of SEO). I've just been trying to create as many backlinks as possible for now until I find some more effective ways.
I run a Nintendo community on a free service host.
I commonly get 8 to 10 guests in a 2 hour period.
I recently found out that one in particular that has been a constant visitor to my site's forums is most likely a bot.
Still, being able to see that guest's IP address and knowing that they will not register really pisses me off....
But bots don't register.
Guests, and even bots can be good for a website's traffic.
In some ways, they can be more useful than an active member, but you've gotta be careful about where the line is between them.