A peek behind the curtain marked "Management" revealed to me that most of these were browsers from other places. No ~ Not "the other place" but a variety of locations as diverse as Africa, The USA and Europe based ISPs.
This happens from time to time as some systems automatically trawl sites like this looking for advertising opportunities (none here) and some are assessing our throughput to decide where to place us on search engines. Others are, of course, nosy b@st@rds who look but never join.
We did not have 36 members on line.
At the moment we are showing two guests and six members. One of those guests is a member ~ having a quick browse no doubt but he has now signed in. The system shows activity over the past 15 minutes so this particular person appears in the stats twice. See how easy it is to get the wrong impression.