Another curiosity - viewership counts on the board

[Josette]

I can't believe you don't know which way it counts them!!  Your way makes more sense for all of the daily increases I've mentioned.

[Patti Feinberg]

I really thought I remembered a place where you could see when viewership was heaviest, but no.

What I found *interesting* was that according to the Board, in the year 2014, we had 2014 new members....

I don't think so...but hey, what do I know?

Patti

[Mysterious Benefactor]

You're right, Patti, that we didn't get 2014 new members in 2014. What we actually got was 2014 submissions for membership - BUT, if we were lucky, maybe 14 of them were from actual people wanting to become members and the other 2000 were from bots. And considering that there's no way to know who the bots are and who the people are until after Midnite vets them, that's why registration is no longer open. As I'm sure you can imagine, tracking down 2000 submissions only to find out they're bots - and often malicious bots at that - is a pain and not something Midnite should have had to put herself through. So, unfortunately, unless or until SMF comes up with a more foolproof way to prevent bots from attempting to register, registration will remain closed.

[Patti Feinberg]

I just sort it was 'hinky'; 2014=2014...


Patti

[Josette]

I wasn't going to go back to this, but with today's I can't resist.  The AGW count has been going up by a little bit, maybe 10-20 a day, but then will jump over 100 from time to time.  But from yesterday to today it jumped more than 900 - I still say it's impossible and something must be wrong with it.

[Josette]

And over 700 more today - that's more than 1600 in 2 days - that's impossible!!!

[Midnite]

The bots that frequently hit the registration page as MB mentioned can also open the posting pages that get stored in their cache. It's unfortunate but really not impossible, Josette.

[Josette]

Well, at least that's an explanation!  I still find it hard to believe it would be that many times, especially when it's usually so little, but I assumed that it meant actual people going to that page that many times and that's what I considered impossible!!

[Mysterious Benefactor]

Well, it could work as well with actual people IF, say, 7 showed up and read through every page of the topic on the same day. And while that might seem improbable, it's also not impossible.

My thing with these big jumps isn't so much as who or what is viewing them as is why? What is it about a topic that attracts so many views in a repeated period of days whereas other topics don't? But we may never be able to answer that question...

Though all of this might be moot in the not too distant future because there is an upgrade available to take the system the forum uses from SMF 2.0 to SMF 2.1 (actually 2.1.3 was released back on November 21st). It's just that I haven't had the time to do a test install for Midnite, dom and I to play with before I do it for real. Supposedly it has tools to better deal with bots...

[Josette]

Are you saying that each page counts as a separate view?

[Patti Feinberg]

Most views are between midnight and 3:00 a.m.?  My god, we are fanatics, aren't we?

Gerard

That's already been established.

[Josette]

I really wasn’t going to post on this topic any more, but the recent amounts have been ridiculously high.  It goes through stages of going up by, say 5 to 30, for several days, then there will be a lot of days much higher, sometimes over 100.  Then some times it will even jump by several hundreds.  Occasionally, if it’s very high, like more than a thousand, I’ve though of posting, but let it go.  But the last few weeks have been EXTREMELY high.

It’s not always exactly 24 hours, but I usually do it at about the same time, so they are certainly within an hour or 2 of 24 hours.  So, the amounts starting with August 26 have been:

393,483   393,844    398,039   400,883    406,652     408,626    411,380    414,701     429,146

449,295   460,468    477,005    489,020    501,119    516,250    531,463    541,070    562,549

579,611   594,576

The differences between each of these amounts are:

406    4,195    2,884    5,769    1,974    2,754    3,321    14,445    20,149    11,173 

16,537     12,015     12,099    15,131    15,213    9,607    21,479    17,062    14,965

I never did believe that the numbers reflected actual views, but now with these amounts it can’t possibly be.  Jumping by 15 to 21 thousand in one day, every day?  It’s over 200,000 in a little under 3 weeks.