It's just a unique identifier for each guest, though it isn't tracked or updated. (Basically it's just a primary key for the sake of having a primary key.)

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It's hard to say if it would've been hit in prior boards, but Acmlm can definitely take a look at the old backup and see where it's at.

Otherwise, do remember that we've been here for about 3 years, now (the old board survived 4), and we're in an age where internet bots are a lot more common than they were back then.

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To further clarify, here's how it works:


- Guests views page
- All entries with that connection's IP address are deleted
- All entries older than 5 minutes are deleted
- The guest's view is logged into the guest table and eats a auto-increment ID


The auto-incrementing ID counter would go up each time (it doesn't get reused or roll over on its own), so after 3+ years of abuse it finally pinned itself at the maximum value.



To give you an idea of the volume of bots, there are about 29 guests from varying IPs in the table right now, though it's impossible to say how many times they've loaded pages between them.

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Originally posted by Orlandu

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I was thinking of it backwards as a separate row per auto increment. But I know how it works, counting up for each new row inserted.

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The misconception here is that the ID was incrementing regardless of the fact that the previous entries were all deleted; by the time I fixed this bug there was only a single row in the table taking up about 1 K of space (most of it overhead from deletions).

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