question. Do linked images outside the forum register as visiting users?

[purplemelon1]

As early as 9 months ago the daily averaged around 200 to 400 users. That changed during ces 2025 hitting 9k peak. Which dropped down to the usual for the sub 1000 count for many months afterwards. Today july 16 hit a peak of all time at 18k guests.
It may not matter much. I do worry if the user count giving a false impression about the popularity. Considering only like 5 people are registered.

It may be of interest changing the tracking if a large part is users loading images hosted here outside the forum. Or maybe some industry event exists that i don't know about. Making this post of no concern.

[Chief Blur Buster]

As early as 9 months ago the daily averaged around 200 to 400 users. That changed during ces 2025 hitting 9k peak. Which dropped down to the usual for the sub 1000 count for many months afterwards. Today july 16 hit a peak of all time at 18k guests.
It may not matter much. I do worry if the user count giving a false impression about the popularity. Considering only like 5 people are registered.

It may be of interest changing the tracking if a large part is users loading images hosted here outside the forum. Or maybe some industry event exists that i don't know about. Making this post of no concern.

I just noticed this post and I apologize for the tardy response.

I believe that specific time window (July 16) was caused by a DoS type event (fake traffic to clog down our site). I then upgraded the web firewalls (we have 2 running concurrently) to hold back the bad traffic. Par for the course.

That timing window didn't seem to have anything to do with linked images, though that's one of the techniques that can consume excess bandwidth. Normally the forum will prefer links to the original posts that serves the images. The server will often fail to serve images (e.g. direct embedding of images hosted on our server) unless the forum is directly visited (e.g. viewing a post or thread).

Traffic as of September is back to normal offpeak, and currently at back-to-school style levels.