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Who are all those visitors?
Posted: Tue Aug 10, 2021 5:02 am
by Deimos
Just a question of mild curiosity for you admin/techie/mod types:
The Who's Online (but not logged in) count has been high double digits... a lot.
Do those numbers indicate real people (guests) perusing the forum or are they bots?
Re: Who are all those visitors?
Posted: Tue Aug 10, 2021 5:44 am
by Valkrist
99% of them are bots.
If you click on 'Who's Online' at the bottom of the forum page, it will typically only display whatever registered users are on at the time. However, at the very top, you will see an option to 'Display Guests'.
Click on that and it will put up a list showing the source of all these creepy crawlies. In the displayed code, you will most likely see the word 'bot', which means exactly that: automated software that just crawls along the web looking for whatever. These are typically used for information data harvesting. You will even notice a few that say they are actively replying to a topic somewhere, which is a perfect example of the infestation by non-human foreign participants that plague services like Twitter and Facebook, fulfilling whatever nefarious agenda they are on. These bots are obviously clued out as to the fact that posting while unregistered will produce 100% of nothing.
Then there are the legitimate one or two persons that are just browsing the forum from the outside, likely brought here by Google or whatever.
Hope that clears it up.
Re: Who are all those visitors?
Posted: Tue Aug 10, 2021 6:36 am
by Deimos
Thanks.... I thought they were bots.
Funny tho'...we never used to have that. Typical number of "guests" was single digits.
Re: Who are all those visitors?
Posted: Tue Aug 10, 2021 6:59 am
by Valkrist
Deimos wrote: Tue Aug 10, 2021 6:36 am
Thanks.... I thought they were bots.
Funny tho'...we never used to have that. Typical number of "guests" was single digits.
We've always had bots. Always. I think the cycles of activity go up and down, but they're always there.
Re: Who are all those visitors?
Posted: Tue Aug 10, 2021 8:20 am
by Olorin
The internet needs to be fumigated.
Re: Who are all those visitors?
Posted: Tue Aug 10, 2021 11:41 am
by Ronin
Was just about to ask about this too. I figured bots but was hoping we had an influx of new collectors that might entice UC and Weta to make more new goodies
Re: Who are all those visitors?
Posted: Tue Aug 10, 2021 6:37 pm
by Deimos
Ronin wrote: Tue Aug 10, 2021 11:41 am
Was just about to ask about this too. I figured bots but was hoping we had an influx of new collectors that might entice UC and Weta to make more new goodies
'Zactly what I was thinking (and hoping). Alas, disappointed (again)
