thread views

[steuben]

I'm sitting here watching my one thread of current interest, and slowly watching the views go up. my ego likes it, but is also a bit suspicious about it. now in days gone by I would believe the numbers, maybe. but these days I don't. poking it a bit it looks like a lot of guests are coming by. the odd thing is that they are also poking at some _really_ old threads, like atomic blue era old.

Not sure if there is a real question or comment in the above... but I'm kind of curious if most of the guests are real or just browse bots looking for data or holes.

[Rigwyn]

Agree, I've noticed that recently, if you look at the list of viewers, you'll often see about 18 guest sessions at a time and all viewing old topics.It sounds like someone is scraping the forum. It's probably not google and archive.org does not have hydlaaplaza listed.

http://hydlaaplaza.com/robots.txt

[LigH]

According to Murphy's laws, there are probably at least twice as many search engines out there as you may expect. And not all of them respect exclusions defined in robots.txt etc.

Filtering the known IP ranges of web crawlers would only filter the known web crawlers. The unknown will still spy on us.