There are definitely bots crawling this forum and inflating guest view counts

Case 1: a thread made a long time ago. For example this old thread Jan 2022 that no one should be viewing:

Thread

Anyone else wants to be immortal?

Possible trigger: Death

Acknowledging that I'm gonna die someday is impossible for me. I wish I could be immortal, and my loved ones as well. I'm depressed everyday thinking about death. I find it impossible to enjoy anything in life since everything I think about is death, wondering if happiness is important or not, since death will just kill it anyway. I wish I was born in the future where partial immortality will be possible. Living for 1000 years. Anyone else can relate?

silver25

Jan 10th 2022

When I first enter into the thread on page 1, I won't be able to see a "Users viewing this thread section".

I advance to page 2, scroll down again, now the "Users viewing this thread" has appeared and I see myself and 11 guests.

I return to page 1, and check again, myself and 19 guests.

In disbelief I go to the page 2 again, and check again, myself and 20 guests are viewing this thread.

Case 2: recent thread at the top of Lounge: tag a user that makes you feel good.

5 minutes ago:

I enter into this thread at page 1. Just me viewing thread.

Go to page 2. Me and 1 guest.

Go to page 3. Now me and 5 guests.

Go to page 4. Me and 11 guests or some higher number than 5.

Just now:

I enter into the thread again at page 1. Me and 27 guests.

--

So what I think, is there must be some kind of bots following my activity and multiplying it. Maybe they are not bots but more like some kind of systems that have to come online every time a user is active in a thread, but in that case why would they be seen as guest users.-

--

A 3rd case: views on my threads or any users threads, when I look at the list of my threads and look at the views, I feel like they're much too high for what the topic is. I think they are 3x or 4x or even 10x of what they actually are, perhaps because of "bot guests multiplying activity".

right now there are 30 guests and 3 members (2 invisible, 1 is me) on my thread

Quote from BEYBLADE

i just did it myself on your thread

started off with just me and then i went back and forth and went up to 3 guest

its probably counting myself going back and forth on the pages of the thread 3 times and the counter counted it like this

code is weird

I dont think that explains the adding of 4 guests or 19 guests,

It could have something to do with code though

Quote from Pinky_Peachy

also a very valid possibility is that when people google something they're searching for, one of our threads pops up and they open it to read? that's what i did before i was a member, i read threads on here a lot

I did that before having an account too but there can't be guests on threads for random topics like Do you want to be immortal? that have been almost a year ago since last post

Another time, I went to a thread for AKP Summer of Fun events that have ended long agoand saw the same thing of unexplained guests

It's also that view counts seem too high on my threads in addition to weird "Users viewing this thread", for example if my thread with 1 page has 90 views, I think 45 would be more realistic

Quote from alexS

pretty sure the answer is somewhere in the middle. There are people and bots.

I was hoping for an answer from someone on forum staff, for the super old threads I feel like it's only bots or something that is not an actual unique viewer because I don't think anyone should be viewing those except for me.

But for the newest threads, and views seeming too high, yes probably a mix of real and non-users

Quote from omnimorphism

You have stalker bots

by my theory everyone does