Who are views coming from

[overgrown]

I created a forum just to archive some stuff believing nobody would ever really see it but I regularly get a dozen or so views almost immediately after posting something. Can someone tell me from where my posts are being seen. Is there a new posts feed somewhere I’m popping up in? Are there pro boards moderators that check new posts? It’s not a big deal if anyone sees my posts or not I’m just curious.

[Scott]

overgrown -

If refresh the page, or go back into a thread it will count as a "view", so some of the immediate views could actually be you.

[Kami]

It's also worth noting that "viewing" has a very broad meaning in this context: any time any user (human or bot) accesses a particular URL, they are considered to be "viewing" that page, regardless of what they actually see.

So if you have your forum set so that only members, or only staff, can see inside boards, then anyone that isn't a part of that designation will see only an error message. However, since the page was still accessed (even though they only see an error message) it counts as a "view".

[overgrown]

Thanks. I kinda keep track of my views so i don’t think it’s that. Even if I just click on create post and then click back a few minutes later without posting anything I’ll have 5 guests waiting to see what I posted. It says I’ve had 70 people on my page at one time. How? Where are they coming from?

[bigballofyarn]

Bots are crawling forums all the time. A minute after I post an announcement in a public board, I have 40 presumed bots viewing that board.

[Kami]

Mar 10, 2024 5:59:29 GMT -8 overgrown said:

Thanks. I kinda keep track of my views so i don’t think it’s that. Even if I just click on create post and then click back a few minutes later without posting anything I’ll have 5 guests waiting to see what I posted. It says I’ve had 70 people on my page at one time. How? Where are they coming from?

I think to kind of levelset expectations, "guests" does not automatically mean people. As ^bigballofyarn mentioned above me, bots crawl forums all the time.

This is especially true for big and/or very established forums like hers, but it can also happen to smaller, newer forums for a few reasons. For example, bots are more likely to discover a new/small forum if it's been featured on a larger more established site (eg affiliate links, ad links, signature links, etc), if it has some really good and organic keyword usage that happens to connect to a keyword rabbit hole that a bot is indexing, and so on.

Bots are also like ants: if they find a site to crawl, their friends arrive ASAP. Bots are more likely to crawl places other bots have crawled before, to make sure whatever content they're indexing are as up to date as it can be. Getting one bot can easily snowball into dozens or even hundreds over the course of a few days or less, depending on the situation.

[overgrown]

Yeah probably bots. Idk what bots have to gain from a forum with no members.

[bigballofyarn]

Mar 10, 2024 15:54:02 GMT -8 overgrown said:

Yeah probably bots. Idk what bots have to gain from a forum with no members.

Data for search engines among other things.

[Kami]

Mar 10, 2024 15:54:52 GMT -8 bigballofyarn said:

Mar 10, 2024 15:54:02 GMT -8 overgrown said:

Yeah probably bots. Idk what bots have to gain from a forum with no members.

Data for search engines among other things.

For what it is worth, indexing bots do not care if there are active communities on the sites they crawl, primarily because bots are just automation and have no feelings, but also because that isn't the purpose of indexing. There aren't special indexing bots for interactive sites and different bots for other web pages where users don't interact with each other. The purpose of an indexing bot is to catalogue keywords that occur on any website, and associate those keywords with that URL, and any other keywords that could be used to find the website. It doesn't matter if there are members, no members, open to the public, gatekept somehow, etc — they're effectively mindless drones whose task it is to index websites, no matter what.

[Joshua Farrell]

My two bits of info, as I figure what I suspect is causing the guest count to inflate, is that certain functions as admin, creates a "guest view" when editing things that give you an option to view it as you edit it. The more you save constantly as you go, the more it creates a new guest instance.

Not sure why it does that also when you post new threads, as that in my mind, shouldn't be an item that requires you to see the content as a guest view, as it isn't an admin panel item.