I find these numbers interesting. Are people so antisocial these days that they must lurk anonymously? What does that say for our society? As it is, very few can communicate in person anymore. It must be with a tweet or text and limited in the number of words. I was born well before the age of digital intercourse. Actually began my civilian career well before Apple became a thing. I'm now retired from the technical madness of Silly Con valley and find the world has regressed. Regressed, repressed, and divided by labels. What have and will we become in the future? Am I just an old fuddy duddy now?
When a person reads a book on their own rather than in a book club, you don’t scold them for “lurking anonymously”, right? A forum contains information. Sometimes people just read information.
If I'm looking at the forums on my mobile it's usually as a guest because I generally just can't be arsed to sign in.
And I'm encouraged by the number of robots showing an interest in improving their writing skills. I know that forum rules keep them "out in the cold," but I think once we evolve as a society we'll find that they are a surprisingly articulate bunch.
Most of those guests are probably bots too. Crawling for search engines, generating thumbnails, caching and archiving content, scanning content to identify malware (or on the dark end of the spectrum, security vulnerabilities). The forum can identify some of the bots but won't identify all of them. Some of the guests will be real users who found a result off google, or saw a link. Probably not too many real lurkers.
I did not "scold". Merely found it interesting. I do see your point though. As with a public library, some visit and do not possess a library card. Apologies if my statement wasn't clear.