Disclaimer regarding 'Users'

This Services page is the only one which shows user counts. The reason for this is that mapping servers to networks is a hard job without services, and when done wrong you quickly overestimate the user counts. For networks that provide services this is much easier, and we feel confident in providing a good servers-to-network mapping.

Still, all these user counts are self-reported by networks. There is some manual checking for high-count anomalies, but other than that there is room for fake data here (ranging from faking the user counts to actually having fake users connected).

When comparing year-to-year figures: the user counts vary during the course of the day. Lots of people are permanently connected to IRC with bouncers or services like IRCCloud, but a sizable portion of the users is not. We only do one sample per year at this moment, and the scan date may be in the weekend one year while being during the workweek another year. Also, parts of the world may be asleep during the scan. The only way to 'fix' this would be by doing multiple samples during the day and doing so during multiple days in the year. Truth is, this is not on the TODO list at the moment.