up vote -10 down vote favorite

Its only a suggestion, on another forums that I have account, I usually see the number of online users seeing the same forum. On my opinion it would be good for users that make questions to see the number of online users that could help him quickly. I take a look on search and didnt see discussions about this before on meta.

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but.. this isn't a forum, and quality is more important than time. Superuser isn't just for quick answers now, its to build up a body of good searchable answer as well. – Journeyman Geek Jun 28 '11 at 13:02
But if there is the information "XX People Chatting" why dont have the information "XXX People Online"? – Diogo Jun 28 '11 at 13:04
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Because the former means you have a chance of actually speaking to someone (which is the goal of chatting), whereas the latter has no meaning. Just because I'm online doesn't mean I'll actually read your OSX or networking question. – Ivo Flipse♦ Jun 28 '11 at 13:06
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2 Answers

up vote 12 down vote accepted

Do you have any reason to believe questions aren't being answered at the moment? In other words, displaying who's online won't raise your chances of getting a (good) answer.

Besides, you'd often want somebody knowledgeable to post an answer, if none of them are online, your indicator has zero value.

If you asked a hard question, it might take time for users to come up and/or write down a solution. Again, having more users online doesn't help with this either.

Honestly, getting an answer to your question isn't a race against the clock and shouldn't be optimized for getting an answer as fast as possible.

Last of all, we're not a forum, but a Q&A site. Our answers aren't meant to only help the OP, they are meant to help hundreds or thousands of other users. To them, it doesn't matter how fast the question was answered, as long as it solves their problem.

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up vote 2 down vote

This is a function of chat -- in the header it will tell you who how many users are online, like so

users (12)

and clicking that will take you to a list of users that were seen recently (well, that is the default users tab anyway)

http://chat.stackexchange.com/users

There are of course dedicated chat rooms for Super User

http://chat.stackexchange.com/rooms?tab=site&sort=active&host=superuser.com

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But this is not what the OP asks for. The chat only counts the number of users that have entered the chat room, so this has no relevance to how many are on the main site. But I agree that this functionality does not belong on the main site (or meta), so I see the answer from @Ivo Flipse as "the answer" here. – awe Jun 30 '11 at 11:57
@awe no, what I described counts ALL users in chat, not just users in a specific chat room. – Jeff Atwood♦ Jun 30 '11 at 12:17
Yes, well ,what I meant is that it still requires that the users is in a chat room - it has nothing to do with the users active on the main site and potentially answering questions. – awe Jun 30 '11 at 12:46
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