Bob,
"Most Online Ever," also includes programmatic spiders and bots that crawl the website frequently to enable search engines to give results from all of our postings. It isn't just people.
That date in August of 2008, if I remember correctly, was also right smack in the middle of the Club's 50th anniversary meet in New Jersey. It is possible there were a larger number of real people also checking in to see if there were any postings from the goings on at the time. Being the time of day the stat was recorded, my guess is it was mostly spiders and bots.
The stat is one the forum software keeps track of on its own. I don't believe there is any way to answer your question about the second most number.
Thanks for asking!
Jeff
