Phenonemonally Interesting Content?

[NewcastleFalcon]

November has broken an all-time FCF record

Who Knew?

screenshot

Regards Neil

[mickthemaverick]

[xantia_v6]

Sadly, I don't think that we really have that many real readers. It looks like most of our current traffic is coming from a block of IP addresses that are allocated in Hong Kong, the requests appear to be coming from mobile browsers, but that data is easily faked. More likely a botnet of some kind, but it does not seem to be causing us any performance issues.

About 50 of them are currently reading the FAQ page, which is absolutely riveting...

[white exec]

At this very moment they are hatching a fiendish plot to steal ideas on how to...

Spoiler: show

...make an X7 steering rack that doesn't leak

[ekjdm14]

Sadly, I don't think that we really have that many real readers. It looks like most of our current traffic is coming from a block of IP addresses that are allocated in Hong Kong, the requests appear to be coming from mobile browsers, but that data is easily faked. More likely a botnet of some kind, but it does not seem to be causing us any performance issues.

About 50 of them are currently reading the FAQ page, which is absolutely riveting...

Interesting to note, a CB radio DX'ing forum I use has been suffering a large scale attack from the very same (Hong Kong, mobile browsers) which had been causing sql errors and resource limits to be reached. This was anywhere from 600-1200 "users" though as the forum software needed attending to & hopefully is sorted now. Maybe worth keeping an eye on though, if it's of any interest I'll post a link to the thread where it was discussed since the solution (which I can't remember except that some IPs were blocked and this didn't fix it so they were unblocked again!) was posted there & it's also a phpBB forum.

[xantia_v6]

They seem to have got bored and moved on, there were only a couple active this morning, and none that I have seen since then. Fortunately we have a fair amount of reserve capacity in our server configuration, so I could not detect any significant increase in loading even when there were 200 odd active.

I am not aware of any current weakness in the phpBB forum software which would make it attractive to attack (and reading the FAQ page is an unlikely attack vector). I think that someone was just exercising their bots.

[NewcastleFalcon]

Well the previous "record" has been obliterated

June 5th 2021, yes last Saturday, yours truly contributed 7 posts. I don't think anything within them caused a spurt of on-line frenzy but the FCF all time record was smashed for "Who is On Line".

Regards Neil

[NewcastleFalcon]

Sadly, I don't think that we really have that many real readers. It looks like most of our current traffic is coming from a block of IP addresses that are allocated in Hong Kong, the requests appear to be coming from mobile browsers, but that data is easily faked. More likely a botnet of some kind, but it does not seem to be causing us any performance issues.

About 50 of them are currently reading the FAQ page, which is absolutely riveting...

The record has been broken again just yesterday....

screenshot FCF record viewers
August 2nd 2023

Phenomenally interesting content at tea-time yesterday or Hong Kong bots again

tricky word to spell phenomenally, looks like I got it wrong in my original thread title

Neil

[CitroJim]

They were all reading my blog

[NewcastleFalcon]

What's going on Recent viewer records are odd. Yet another all time record set.

Most users ever online was 639 on Thu Aug 10, 2023 5:20 pm


Neil

[xantia_v6]

I took a look at the live viewing data and there were 250 odd guests (at the time), but about 200 of them were Bytedance bots. Bytedance is the company that owns TikTok.

They were counted as guests as bot definitions need to be manually entered into the database, they will now be bundled up and counted as one user.

Their software is a bit suspect, as about 20 of them were simultaneously reading the FAQ.

[NewcastleFalcon]

I took a look at the live viewing data and there were 250 odd guests (at the time), but about 200 of them were Bytedance bots. Bytedance is the company that owns TikTok.

They were counted as guests as bot definitions need to be manually entered into the database, they will now be bundled up and counted as one user.

Their software is a bit suspect, as about 20 of them were simultaneously reading the FAQ.

Thanks Mike, any speculation on the purpose I presume they must harvest information of some form or other however uninteresting, but maybe part of a general gathering of internet interactions of us humans on a scattergun approach to feed AI.

Neil

[xantia_v6]

They could have been searching for specific content, perhaps related to copyright, or they could be building a database for a new AI bot. Or it could be just a software bug that caused them to be scanning our site.

[Huskyxantia]

Scraping bit coin lol

[Michel]

Thanks Mike, any speculation on the purpose I presume they must harvest information of some form or other....

Neil

They're reading Zel's blog. Chinese bots are learning how to repair portable computers and handhelds.