Our event last night had be over 3k view on SS. We normal get about 1k. So I checked out some other events and they’re the same. One that normally gets 200-300 views also had over 3k.

Regards - Mick

1 minute ago, Mick Boyle said:

Our event last night had be over 3k view on SS. We normal get about 1k. So I checked out some other events and they’re the same. One that normally gets 200-300 views also had over 3k.

Regards - Mick

our site does get hit by search/ai bots at random times, which can inflate the site views/reads data which I guess is what happened here

there was one big spike a few days ago

24 minutes ago, Mike said:

our site does get hit by search/ai bots at random times, which can inflate the site views/reads data which I guess is what happened here

there was one big spike a few days ago

looking at fridays logs and individual event views and other data and such does seem that there was a massive hit by bots

already have had to make recent changes to some site features due to this problem, as in making some features members only etc

this latest 'hit' by bots does brings into question the 'usefulness' of having event or indeed any other feature reads/views as per the current setup

need to look at this all a lot deeper

Thanks Mike, it’s not a problem and I did suspect the bots.

On 23/08/2025 at 14:41, Mike said:

looking at fridays logs and individual event views and other data and such does seem that there was a massive hit by bots

already have had to make recent changes to some site features due to this problem, as in making some features members only etc

this latest 'hit' by bots does brings into question the 'usefulness' of having event or indeed any other feature reads/views as per the current setup

need to look at this all a lot deeper

For the uninitiated what is a "massive hit by bots" ?

Why does it occur ?

Bots are kinda false accounts used to flood a topic on YT for instance.

1 hour ago, Modernsoulsucks said:

For the uninitiated what is a "massive hit by bots" ?

Why does it occur ?

Bots are kinda false accounts used to flood a topic on YT for instance.

recently there has been a lot of what appears to be 'bots' crawling the site and scraping content on here for various purposes

it used to be mainly for search engine type motives such as google, but with the rise of AI there does appear to be a lot more content 'scraping' going on

the below may help taken from

https://www.cloudflare.com/en-gb/learning/bots/what-is-a-bot/

A bot is a software application that is programmed to do certain tasks. Bots are automated, which means they run according to their instructions without a human user needing to manually start them up every time. Bots often imitate or replace a human user's behavior. Typically they do repetitive tasks, and they can do them much faster than human users could.

Bots usually operate over a network; more than half of Internet traffic is bots scanning content, interacting with webpages, chatting with users, or looking for attack targets. Some bots are useful, such as search engine bots that index content for search or customer service bots that help users. Other bots are "bad" and are programmed to break into user accounts, scan the web for contact information for sending spam, or perform other malicious activities. If it's connected to the Internet, a bot will have an associated IP address.

Bots can be:

• Chatbots: Bots that simulate human conversation by responding to certain phrases with programmed responses

• Web crawlers (Googlebots): Bots that scan content on webpages all over the Internet

• Social bots: Bots that operate on social media platforms

• Malicious bots: Bots that scrape content, spread spam content, or carry out credential stuffing attacks