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General Chat / Re: NWR Data Question

« on: Yesterday at 04:19:40 AM »

On the subject, I've noticed something odd lately. There seem to be a lot of guests (possibly spiders or other web data gathering tools) coming to the site all of a sudden. Look at the bottom of the Main Forum Index. Most online ever is at 13,461 last month around early morning when the spambots like to show up. But like a week or so, the Most Online Today was at 3,999. Today it is just a paltry 951. I've noticed the views on topics have gone up as well. At least a year or two, you'd see article posted in Talkback with 0 replies and maybe around 50-90 views and that was just sort of the average stats. Now I'm seeing topics with 0 replies but around like 1000 views and this is for recent stuff. Not old topics that have taken a long time to accumulate views. Even in the other forums, the thread views seem super high all of a sudden. Over 14,000 views for a small topic I created in NWR Feedback about Connection Issues that's 4 months old. Why so many views?

I'm thinking it's like A.I. tools that are just running amok constantly scrapping all data they can find anywhere in the internet about a topic or keyword.

High view counts with low replies usually suggest bots or crawlers rather than real engagement.