Just wanted to let you guys know that they are aware of this and are working to fix it!

Not the same issue actually! But yes they are aware. It was disabled on purpose because they are working on something, but Bug has said the data is safe.

A fix has been pushed. Please allow a couple hours for the numbers to slowly move back to normal :)

It's currently under-reporting a bit. Prior to being broken, it was accurate. The full story is that it was disabled while trying to troubleshoot lag. Normally it runs on every page view, which is a lot. When I brought it back, I rate-limited it, so it will under-report a bit but still be a decent estimate. I'm going to adjust this limit though because it looks like it's been off by over a hundred so I probably overshot this lol.

We do have a proper solution to implement in the longer term, that will actually give accurate numbers again without being inefficient - it'll take time but it's on our todo list!

Yeah I made a mistake. Give me like 20 minutes lol!

[edit] I am going to keep an eye on this, and keep adjusting it until we have something about as accurate as the old real-time solution.

Basically it's adjusting how frequently we poll and record people as online, versus how far back to go when counting the users online number (like do we count the number of users online in the last 10 seconds, 30 seconds, 2 minutes, etc) - the first number has to be limited, the second number needs to be... much smaller than I made it originally lol.

[edit] Setting it to the last 1 minute seems to be the happy medium I was looking for. I'm considering this fixed for now. Enjoy :)