To explain the 'ticker' login mentioned by tye, you can prevent your username from appearing in the other users nodelet by adding a 'ticker=yes' parameter to the login URI (or to the POST parameters). From what I remember, I believe this just adds a character to the end of the login cookie (a 1 ("one") or an excalamtion point, I can't quite remember, and I cannot test right now). So each time you fetch a page from perlmonks, it sees that character and doesn't update your 'last access' date field, thus shielding you from the other users list.
