Page views?

I just noticed this yesterday after posting some recent notes. Usually, our board is quite quiescent and the view count reflects that. But soon after posting, I saw the views go up exponentially (thousands of views? really?). Not sure if it is hacking or troll activity, but David or Robin might want to check it out and see what's happening.

[Robin Garr]

Hmm. That IS unusual. I've got no theory, but I assume that wine geeks sitting at home and thinking about wine isn't it. On the other hand, they may be running up our ad eyeballs.

[Robin Garr]

Okay, I took a look under the hood, and our visitors are up a bit since widespread social distancing started, but there's no evidence of any kind of denial-of-service attack or unusual traffic from Russia, China, etc. The weird numbers might be some kind of phpBB bug, but as long as it's not hurting anything, I'm not going to worry about it.

Robin wrote:
" ….might be some kind of phpBB bug, but as long as it's not hurting anything, I'm not going to worry about it."

That's what I say about the "Bugs" in my wine cellar.

Salute

It could just be a bot that did not identify itself correctly, and thus got its work included in the stats. More likely just incompetent or sloppy than a malicious attack. That would be my guess.

[Robin Garr]

That makes sense, Steve, because the inflated numbers seem largely limited to the first page of the forum.

I, too, think it's some sort of unregistered bot. Just in the past half hour there have been hundreds of visits to first-page topics. As I write this, I'm the only forum member listed, but there are 47 guests, which is an unusually high number.

-Paul W.

[Robin Garr]

Well, they're not clicking the ads.

More seriously, that would also suggest bots. Google almost certainly has a way to identify and decline to count bot clicks. Most of the usual bot visitors you see in that page-end summary are not malicious bots but search-engine crawlers from all over the world.

"Users browsing this forum" says right now "Paul Winalski and 57 guests". I often see Google and other web crawlers listed as "Google [bot]", etc. So the forum software can recognize properly configured web crawlers. Whatever these are, they're not being recognized as bots.

-Paul W.

[Robin Garr]

There's no telling, Paul. They're more scared of us than we are of them. Actually, it could be unregistered visitors lurking the forum. Seems like a lot, but there's really no way to know if they're wine geeks, random visitors, or harmless bots.

[Robin Garr]

Hey, you guys! Am I wrong, or is the count moving back to normal? Maybe the bot squadron moved on?

Cd be, just showed me and 3 guests when I looked just now