Guest posting?

Smasher

I was browsing the "Who is Online" page a bit ago, when I noticed that one guest's location was "Posting a message". Is that message a bug, or is guest posting allowed somewhere?

Oh, this was on the SE side of the forum, if that makes a difference.

Szechuanosaurus

Probably a login time out whilst they were posting or something.

Älphämönkëy

No, guests can't post, but they can try. Try posting in a locked thread, it doesn't let you, but you are still in the "posting a message" screen.

Szechuanosaurus

alphamonkey wrote:

No, guests can't post, but they can try. Try posting in a locked thread, it doesn't let you, but you are still in the "posting a message" screen.

That would've been my second guess, but I thought that if you weren't logged in and hit the post reply button then it redirected you to the login page. But then I don't know how the user tracker is coded so for all I know it could still register you as Guest - Posting and Message in that circumstance.

Älphämönkëy

PixelSumorai wrote:

alphamonkey wrote:

No, guests can't post, but they can try. Try posting in a locked thread, it doesn't let you, but you are still in the "posting a message" screen.

That would've been my second guess, but I thought that if you weren't logged in and hit the post reply button then it redirected you to the login page. But then I don't know how the user tracker is coded so for all I know it could still register you as Guest - Posting and Message in that circumstance.

It uses HTTP codes to redirect. Typically, bots ignore those, and the follow up on it at a later date. My guess is that is google's adsense bot. Session information is updated prior to the redirect so for a normal user it would go
Viewing Topic
Posting
Logging in

For the bot it goes Viewing topic -> Posting. It waits a little bit, and then goes to logging in.