As per an earlier topic, the site over the last few days has been subject to many 'bots' (1000s) visiting our content with the main purposes being to scrape content

This 'massive' rise in bots is more than likely due to the rise of AI services and their need for content, no matter what it is, for learning, training and so on

While this scraping may be useful for ai services, it does unfortunately have a effect on the site, mainly on the sites performance but also on our page/item views/stats, which as you may have seen, have caused our views/reads to have been inflated greatly over the last few days

Work is ongoing to try and deal with this, both now and for the future, such as the blocking of ai bots, making some features members only etc etc

however there is no easy way to undo the inflation that we have seen say eg100s of views turing into 1000s

Work and such is still ongoing but thought post up a quick note just so you are aware of current score and what's behind the rise of 'views'

mike

Best of luck with this endeavor, Mike.

I work for a software company that sells websites to our members, and this has been a consistent problem, especially for the last few years as bots get smarter and perform more complex actions. We used to see questionable statistics in our search stats, but now its clicks, too.

Ok have taken actions to lessen the amount of 'harmful' bots visiting our site,

This appears to have worked well as the amount of such visits has now fallen back to a more 'normal' level

Unfortunately after the last few days, it does mean that the number of 'views' per content over time is always going to be a less valid statistic on here more and more as time passes, and so this will be reflected in its future use on the site, as in 'number of views' will be given less prominence on various displays such as news items, forum posts and event items

ho hum

I know nothing of this subject,so im eager to understand the implication? Apart from causing site problems,what does inflated views matter? Isnt it just a number?

4 minutes ago, Dobber said:

I know nothing of this subject,so im eager to understand the implication? Apart from causing site problems,what does inflated views matter? Isnt it just a number?

first of all the site is set up to handle up to a certain limit of visitors

once this limit is exceeded the site then slows down and can stop/fail/break simply due to the number of viewers

we have been taking over 10 times the normal amount of visitors over last weekend

on the inflated views

if you look at various recent posts right now you can see that the viewing figures has been exaggerated on some/most items over the last few days

as in some normal low view topics now have 1000s of views instead of say a normal daily 100+count

which while may be an accurate technical figure of the number of views, it is not a real world figure as x amount of bot views are included

quite a few members do take notice on these views and have had queries on them over the last weekend

no easy solution at the moment, have taken actions to try and prevent 'harmful' bots, but due to their nature feel its going to be an ongoin gthing and may be best to make these 'views' stats less prominent

Maybe its hundreds of new northern soul fans....or as it seems, northern soul bots😂

But yes thanks for some insight,makes sense👍

2 hours ago, Source Team said:

first of all the site is set up to handle up to a certain limit of visitors

once this limit is exceeded the site then slows down and can stop/fail/break simply due to the number of viewers

we have been taking over 10 times the normal amount of visitors over last weekend

on the inflated views

if you look at various recent posts right now you can see that the viewing figures has been exaggerated on some/most items over the last few days

as in some normal low view topics now have 1000s of views instead of say a normal daily 100+count

which while may be an accurate technical figure of the number of views, it is not a real world figure as x amount of bot views are included

quite a few members do take notice on these views and have had queries on them over the last weekend

no easy solution at the moment, have taken actions to try and prevent 'harmful' bots, but due to their nature feel its going to be an ongoin gthing and may be best to make these 'views' stats less prominent

How many views did my Keele All-Nighter have before the suspension?

Just interested, as would like to see how much approx. 3,000 est. real views was inflated by the 'bot problem'.

28 minutes ago, Pep said:

How many views did my Keele All-Nighter have before the suspension?

Just interested, as would like to see how much approx. 3,000 est. real views was inflated by the 'bot problem'.

current figure is approx 9300 views

1 hour ago, Dobber said:

Maybe its hundreds of new northern soul fans....or as it seems, northern soul bots😂

But yes thanks for some insight,makes sense👍

no probs

18 hours ago, Mike said:

current figure is approx 9300 views

Yes, that looks around 3 x what I'd have expected. 😳

This is really interesting, Mike though i appreciate it's also a strain on the platform as well the knock-on to views etc.

Do you have a sense of who has picked SS to bot train and why this site specifically - is it just random training / data collection and a random page hit based on its popularity/usage or would you reckon it was for more specific purposes?

Cheers & thanks for the on-going work,

GB

1 minute ago, Tailormade Gaz B said:

This is really interesting, Mike though i appreciate it's also a strain on the platform as well the knock-on to views etc.

Do you have a sense of who has picked SS to bot train and why this site specifically - is it just random training / data collection and a random page hit based on its popularity/usage or would you reckon it was for more specific purposes?

Cheers & thanks for the on-going work,

GB

I don't think anyone has/would target the site specifically, I'd say it's more of a general greedy get all the data we can approach, there's a fair few bots from well known ai services which are well behaved to a certain degree. but there are also lot of 'dodgy' ones about, a lot of them from overseas (masked so hard to id) which over the last weekend just seemed to run riot harvesting every page/item

Actions taken seemed to have had a effect as things have quietened down.

Bugger,

And I thought it was because of real interest in our event😉🤭.

Good work gang,your doing a brilliant job on one of the best sites for our scene.

Cheers

Ade.

This is happening to thousands of websites, with AI bots from Google and alike 'crawaling' sites for information, as well as registering products in online shops etc. As Mike points out, in some cases the extremes in unwarranted traffic can not only slow sites and servers down but cause them to fail and go offline to re-set. Unfortuanately, this happens and the bots come back and continue.

If you don't understand why these AI bots would be trawling sites like this ... PERHAPS THIS BELOW GOES SOME WAY TO EXPLAIN THINGS ....

... at soul weekenders, you can buy NS mugs, caps, watches, T-shirts & more BUT these are ordered by people on the scene who know the scene to sell to folk on the scene. Some people approve of this merchandise, others don't ... that's not really the point. But coz this stuff is put up for sale by soulsters, they know what might sell easily coz of their 'insider knowledge'.

MOVE ON TO 2025 and scan the pages of Chinese on-line mega seller TEMU... what are they selling ... it's all stuff made in China to sell to folk worldwide ... WELL at present you can buy >> > > >

Wigan Casino table cloths (in 3 different designs), Torch baseball caps, NS venue badge covered aprons, record label rugs, sticky backed NS venue stickers, Keep The Faith polo shirts, Motown T-shirts, Tamla Motown logo caps, Twisted Wheel caps (of various designs) and T-shirts, polo shirts & vinyl stickers, imitation soul 45's on tinplate (round), repro 100 Club Posters, record shop type signs on tinplate, reproduction Motown artist gig posters, Cleethorpes T-shirts, 45 record design umbrellas, NS KTF shopping bags, repro Mojo Club poster, Stax T shirts, Otis Redding show posters in tinplate or canvas, soul album covers on tinplate, music mag copies of old Motown / Stax adverts, Otis Redding baseball caps, Frankie Beverly & Maze T-shirts & baseball caps (the caps in 10 different colours), repro 60's soul act venue posters, T-shirts featuring Graham Central Stn album covers and MUCH MORE.

If you think there's a factory guy in rural China that has in depth knowledge on the NS / soul scene you'd be wrong. AI bots are trawling sites like this, collecting data and selling it to factory guys in China so that they'll know what's likely to sell to Brits on the soul scene.

And the stuff they sell isn't just aimed @ the UK market ...

I'd say a ok reference if wanna look a bit deeper on it all

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

Best of luck Mike tis an issue for my own sons business too

Thanks to all contributors this is really a 21st Century problem and fascinating at the same time.

My understanding is that only the author can see the number of hits the ad has received. If the bots want to buy the tickets maybe we need to rent a bigger venue!

I did an all-nighter pre-Covid (2018) and was I astonished to see over 6000 hits, which at the time was based on a venue with a maximum capacity of 500. I never really thought it probable at the time, but maybe this has been happening for up to 10 years?

My current ad on Soul Source (12 September 2025 @ Nantwich Civic Hall) has had a great response and we monitor this by asking customers where they saw the advert, at the point where they buy a ticket. It has already sold 75% of capacity and that is the only number that really matters.

KTF

Mike Harris

1 hour ago, Mikeharris said:

I did an all-nighter pre-Covid (2018) and was I astonished to see over 6000 hits, which at the time was based on a venue with a maximum capacity of 500. I never really thought it probable at the time, but maybe this has been happening for up to 10 years?

My current ad on Soul Source (12 September 2025 @ Nantwich Civic Hall) has had a great response and we monitor this by asking customers where they saw the advert, at the point where they buy a ticket. It has already sold 75% of capacity and that is the only number that really matters.

KTF

Mike Harris

mike, on the 2018 6000 views figure, maybe need to bear in mind that the view/reads figure was just an indicator of how many times the event entry has been viewed, not how many individuals have actually read it

if you do have people posting comments then the 'views' can quickly increase as people re-visit to read the latest comment/replies

your 2018 nighter had over 50 comments which perhaps sort of explains why it had so many views

this was posted Friday in the events update topic

had a few q's since so posting here as well

Friday at 09:34

Just a quick word on 'event views'

Due to the inflated event views caused by the 'hostile bot' issue, going to leave the 'event views' display switched off for now

There are two main reasons

Firstly all the event views during the last week or so were inflated greatly by the 'bot' visits and there is no real way right now to deflate these figures

Secondly while have took steps to limit the 'hostile' bots, there is no guarantee that this will not happen again

So in summary, it does seem that the days of using event views as an indicator for both promoters and viewers to gauge the interest in the actual events are over

Not great news but unfortunately can't see any other choice

mike