Most online

[jeffmori7]

What happened today?

 

I find it amusing to follow the stats about the online visitors and so far the most online today number was something like 292...and today it has jumped to 637?!

[JBird]

I check it as well. Since I've been frequenting the site it seemed user traffic jumps on bigger days for brk or ffh; so it seems an odd day for a two-fold increase.

[John Hjorth]

Most likely that figure on daily basis is under influence of the number of robots [bots, crawlers, spiders] visiting the board, which can swing wildly. [sanjeev might however have shut the bots out]. Bots can be good or bad. We as Internet users need the good bots, because they constantly read and map the ever expanding frontier of the Internet, thereby making the internet searchable.

 

I.e. about the GoogleBot here:

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Googlebot

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/182072?hl=en

 

Bad bots can have several questionable purposes, among them harvesting email adresses for spam purposes. On this board [a SMF board], the bots aren't visible. I don't know if Sanjeev can make them visible. On certain other types of board software the administrator can make bots visible, i.e. please take a look at the homeplace of an other board software called phpBB [ https://www.phpbb.com/community/ ], where you can actually see the names of the bots visiting that board recently.

[Parsad]

Hi Jeff,

 

Simple Machine updates usually have good security patches from time to time to keep the bots out.  I suspect they figured a new way to be registered as online, as a security patch was issued a couple of days ago.  I just installed it, so the count should go back to the 250-300 level.  Cheers!

[watsa_is_a_randian_hero]

something odd is going on...amazon was down for 30 minutes yesterday, it seems a lot of websites were loading slowly (even this morning wikipedia pages were timing out for me).

[oddballstocks]

If sites seem slow and you want to know if it's you or them the best resource is the Internet Health Report:

 

http://www.internetpulse.net

 

The grid shows all of the major routers on the internet, yellow and red ones are having issues.  If your traffic goes through one of those routers you'll see slow traffic.