Random huge spike of page views, eating through ad free

[weareallone]

Forum URL: awakeningforums.com

Hello!

I've been paying for ad-free for years for 50,000 views with an overage possibility of up to 100,000 views for a month. This has worked great and I have never gone over the 50k until the last 2 months. I just was hoping to seek some further clarification as to how the ad free works and a few other things.

I've never really been focused on analytics or watching incoming/outgoing traffic, and as such have never installed google analytics or any other statistics tracking service on my forums (except stat counter at one point but I never even checked it) And as such I'm at a loss data wise for the explanation behind these sudden spikes or their cause. While this motivates me to setup analytics to see where this potential traffic is coming from, it also leaves me with several questions and concerns.

One question is, would refreshing the forums count as a page view? Or does a page view come down to a unique first time view? Could someone theoretically auto click a refresh button on a web browser and run up your page views and eat into the ad free page view count?

While I don't think that is very likely in this case, it was a question I had. I'm sure maybe a link or two got picked up or posted somewhere and gained a large increase in organic traffic? It's hard to tell by proboards built in analytics because it just shows page view/forum requests and not much more behind it. (Again, shot myself in the foot never setting something up myself)

My last question is, could it be bot crawling activity? I mean that is a lot of requests but I did recently restructure the forum and that seems to get a lot of crawler activity when you change things around.

Basically this boils down to a concern of ad-free becoming unafforable if this continues. I'm sure some forum owners have experienced forum growth and such could not keep up with the rising cost of ad-free. This is a concern of mine and I enjoy the benefits of providing an ad-free experience but I can see how expensive it can get fast. This is kind of a jumbled thread but I hope someone can answer on the key points. Mainly I'm curious if this is indeed organic traffic and growth or perhaps bot related. Again, I wish I had setup analytics because I could have answered it myself but alas, here I am seeking some outside help.

Thanks for your time, and I appreciate any feedback

[Kitty Katt]

Feb 11, 2021 2:19:44 GMT -8 weareallone said:

One question is, would refreshing the forums count as a page view? Or does a page view come down to a unique first time view? Could someone theoretically auto click a refresh button on a web browser and run up your page views and eat into the ad free page view count?

Hello.

Any time a page is loaded, it counts as a pageview. So, yes, a refresh would also count as a pageview. As far as auto-clicking the refresh button, I believe that, if clicks happen too fast, ProBoards itself initiates a system ban for the click spamming (this would need a ProBoards Admin to confirm, though).

Feb 11, 2021 2:19:44 GMT -8 weareallone said:

My last question is, could it be bot crawling activity? I mean that is a lot of requests but I did recently restructure the forum and that seems to get a lot of crawler activity when you change things around.

Basically this boils down to a concern of ad-free becoming unafforable if this continues. I'm sure some forum owners have experienced forum growth and such could not keep up with the rising cost of ad-free. This is a concern of mine and I enjoy the benefits of providing an ad-free experience but I can see how expensive it can get fast. This is kind of a jumbled thread but I hope someone can answer on the key points. Mainly I'm curious if this is indeed organic traffic and growth or perhaps bot related. Again, I wish I had setup analytics because I could have answered it myself but alas, here I am seeking some outside help.

If you have changed things around and/or have added new content, it could conceivably be bots re-indexing the content. I would suggest turning off Ad-Free for Guests if it is eating up your pageviews. You can do this by going to Admin -> Upgrades -> Ad-Free -> Settings (tab) and set Remove Ads For Guests to No. This will save from Guests eating up pageviews, essentially only giving logged-in members the benefit of Ad-Free.

[Kami]

Feb 11, 2021 4:02:18 GMT -8 Kitty Katt said:

Feb 11, 2021 2:19:44 GMT -8 weareallone said:

One question is, would refreshing the forums count as a page view? Or does a page view come down to a unique first time view? Could someone theoretically auto click a refresh button on a web browser and run up your page views and eat into the ad free page view count?

Hello.

Any time a page is loaded, it counts as a pageview. So, yes, a refresh would also count as a pageview. As far as auto-clicking the refresh button, I believe that, if clicks happen too fast, ProBoards itself initiates a system ban for the click spamming (this would need a ProBoards Admin to confirm, though).

Not a PB admin, but I can answer this.

Yes, auto-refreshing can eat up your page views, but it is also true that too many rapid refreshes could trigger a ban by setting off the DDoS protective measures. This isn't necessarily caused by auto refreshes (though it's the most likely scenario if the culprit is an individual refreshing), as I have seen people playing rapid-fire post games get hit with a ban for too many rapid refreshes as well.

It is entirely possible for someone who is constantly refreshing to eat up your adfree, even if they don't get flagged as a DDoS attack, as long as their refreshes are timed within a reasonable, natural amount of time.

That said, the most likely cause is as Kitty mentioned — it sounds like you have adfree enabled for guests, so any time your forum traffic spikes (which posting your link here on Support or another frequently-crawled website will often do) they'd eat up adfree with their requests esp if they come in droves.

[weareallone]

Thanks for the responses and help =] I appreciate it