Hey there hi there ho there! :-)

[I M Dex]

I just noticed that at the moment, there are "147 guests" here now. Shout out to all you OSA elves on production time!

 

[Type4_PTS]

On a XenForo forum such as this, when the software shows the stat for the number of guests, it doesn't distinguish between human guests,
search engine spiders, SEO / archive/ AI scrapers.

Of the 147 "guests" you noticed, in all likelihood, only 15 to 50 of them had human DNA, and the rest were bots & crawlers.

 

[I M Dex]

On a XenForo forum such as this, when the software shows the stat for the number of guests, it doesn't distinguish between human guests,
search engine spiders, SEO / archive/ AI scrapers.

Of the 147 "guests" you noticed, in all likelihood, only 15 to 50 of them had human DNA, and the rest were bots & crawlers.

Well, bots and crawlers need love and attention too, after all, they're our internet BT's.

 

[guanoloco]

Well, bots and crawlers need love and attention too, after all, they're our internet BT's.

...sleep...don't sleep...sleep....don't sleep...

 

[ILove2Lurk]

For the past week or so, I've noticed we're averaging about 3000 bots and/or crawlers at any one time, day or night. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

 

[guanoloco]

For the past week or so, I've noticed we're averaging about 3000 bots and/or crawlers at any one time, day or night. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

That's interesting. I wonder how much internet traffic in general is the same? Sort of like the ultimate Q&A.

 

[Type4_PTS]

For the past week or so, I've noticed we're averaging about 3000 bots and/or crawlers at any one time, day or night. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I asked ChatGPT about why this could be happening, and I see that the dramatic increase in "guests" is happening on other Xenforo forums as well.


ChatGPT:

Yes, this looks overwhelmingly like automated traffic, not 3,000 people suddenly discovering ESMB Redux.

Right now, ESMB Redux shows about 2,893 guests versus only 4 logged-in members. More tellingly, the public “Current visitors” page shows page after page of guests doing the same thing: “Viewing latest content,” often “a moment ago.” There are 148 pages of visitor listings. That repetitive, synchronized pattern is classic crawler or bot behavior.

My best estimate​

Out of approximately 3,000 displayed guests:

• Likely humans: perhaps 20–100
• Bots, crawlers, scrapers, or automated probes: approximately 2,900–2,980

That range is an inference, because only the administrator’s server and Cloudflare logs can prove it. But I would be astonished if hundreds, let alone thousands, were actual readers.

Why the sudden jump?​

The strongest clue is that other XenForo administrators have reported almost the same sudden phenomenon recently:

• One small XenForo forum jumped from a few hundred guests to 3,000, then 4,800, with visitors repeatedly viewing “Latest content” and coming from globally distributed IP addresses.
• Another XenForo discussion specifically described an “explosion” to 3,064 guests; the recommended explanation was bots that XenForo’s built-in detection fails to recognize.
• XenForo operators have reported AI crawlers driving guest counts into the thousands or tens of thousands, sometimes overwhelming the session-activity database.