Karpel Tunnel wrote:What do bots get out of visiting a thread?
This is a good question, and I don't really know the answer. I know we get scraped by all the major search engines (except for one that I had to block recently because it was scraping us so vigorously that the site was nearly inaccessible). I assume there's a lot of research scraping, e.g. advertizers looking for mentions of products or trying to connect words to identify promising behavioral advertizing leads. The recently released GPT-3 was
trained on a lot web text (among other things), so I assume there are bots crawling for this kind of research as well.
Then there are malicious bots, e.g. bots trying to guess passwords or find unprotected directories or do SQL injection attacks. I don't know how they work, or if they tend to crawl around sites in a way that would create views for individual threads, but I know we get lots of them. There may also be bots that crawl the web looking for sites like this to spam with ads, because we get a lot of link spamming.
I assume there are other purposes, both nefarious and benign.
iambiguous wrote:By dropping precipitously I didn't mean the number of views was actually less than before but that the increase in views from day to each day had dropped significantly.
Ah, my mistake. I expect the first derivative does rise and fall, as the zombie scrapers shamble past and fix their dead but all consuming gaze upon us.
Mowk wrote:Am I to understand that "bots scraping data" generate hits in Php's reporting of views?
To be fair to phpBB, I don't actually know how their page views are counted. I'm pretty sure that some bots are excluded, e.g. the big search engines actually have user accounts and I'm pretty sure their scraping is ignored. But less well known/above board scrapers that aren't recognized are probably seen as human, and I think it would be counted as a 'view' every time they request a page. But again, I may be wrong. This also may have changed in more recent versions, our instance is a bit out of date.
User Control Panel > Board preference > Edit display options > Display signatures: No.
