The Con of Our Tent Subscription

[Mister Obvious]

A thread that has less than 200 views shouldn't suddenly have 400+ views less than a minute later.

Yeah, I think I can understand where you're coming from now. That would give me the same sense of being "offended" by the presence of bots like it does whenever I've seen those mega swarms online. Hmmm, thanks for explaining, I appreciate understanding your perspective.

[Mister Obvious]

I didn't deal with that in the first years of this forum... everything was steady. I only ever noticed the first swarm probably like 3 years into the site being online. By then there was a steady regular number of views that threads would get within like a week of being posted. I never noticed anything that upset the balance.

There have been like 2 threads though... the subjects of the threads put out a bot hit on 'em so they would get bolstered views. I knew what they were doing each time, but I felt bad for them, so I just allowed it. It is what it is. If they wanted it that bad, they can have it.

There is a certain magic to all the numbers which I appreciate and recognize. But I guess not every systems operator would appreciate that, as it is a tad mystical in nature.

[Guest]

Another bot, maybe [redacted], came through and scraped the entire site in under two minutes one time. They changed user agent strings for every request, which was a sure sign they were up to no good.

[Redacted] is a Chinese search engine, as well as China's largest AI company. They must've been scraping content to train an AI because no legit search engine would behave that way.

[Guest]

No, it wasn't [redacted]. The bot was hosted on Amazon cloud. I had to block two IP ranges to stop it, as all of the UAs were legit.

[Mister Obvious]

I'ma need you to stop droppin' specific names of these bot armies and even [redacted] though...

I will probably go back and edit out every instance of that site's name in the database.

I hope you understand.

[Guest]

Understood. I'll e-mail you a list of all of the UAs and ranges I had to block.

[Mister Obvious]

Fabulous, many thanks.

[Guest]

I don't remember the specific reason for blocking each one, but I have a thread that lists 12 possible reasons a bot might get a 403.