you can get rid of this feature under admin/modules and uncheck the box for users online.
personally, i like to have mine on the admin page only so i can see how many users there are but customers cannot
to do this, you can comment this line out of skin1/customer/home.tpl
change this:
Code:
{if $active_modules.Users_online ne "" and $users_online}{ include file="modules/Users_online/menu_users_online.tpl" }
{/if}
to this:
Code:
{*{if $active_modules.Users_online ne "" and $users_online}{ include file="modules/Users_online/menu_users_online.tpl" }
{/if}*}
not sure how to increase it artificially.