Forum shows numbers viewing private forums
 

The vast majority of my categories are private and as far as I know should be invisible to unregistered users/crawlers, however several sections are showing several users viewing when no members online.

Any ideas what is causing this?

well they may show that a user is viewing it sure if your looking at who is online.

The url would still be the same. If a user can not view it remember all they see if the diewell message you do not have permission to view.

If you have bots crawling your site they try various numbers etc.

Yes appreciate that Chuck, as run a big vBulletin forum and a couple of other forums as well, on the vbulletin forum it'll show attempted views, where they are seeing an error message.

With this installation much of the forum structure is not visible to bots, or at least shouldn't be, but if as you suggests they try different numbers etc, then that may explain it.:)

Yeah bots definately randomly try various urls

The forum or gallery online scripts simply record the url and ip or userid of the viewer. It does not tell you what the actual user is seeing.