Brian
Administrator
Posts: 3,793
|
Post by Brian on Feb 20, 2011 1:07:44 GMT -8
I've learned -- and seen -- a lot since I started this Traffic Report two pages and 10 months ago. And the visiting IP addresses have increased exponentially as well. The last time I posted in this thread on Nov. 25, the message board had 16 guests in the previous 24 hours, with 9 of those being Googlebots. As I begin writing this post, we've had 78 guests in the past 24 hours, 38 of them Googlebots. Googlebots link our content throughout the World Wide Web. Most of the other 40 IP addresses are robots that place the ads on our pages or their cheap outlaw brethren, the would be comment spammers. But Google has also sent unexplained human beings --just in the past day -- from Lebanon, Penn., Secaucus, N.J., Poolesville, Md., Brighton, Colo., Montclair, N.J. and Haymarket, Va.
|
|
Brian
Administrator
Posts: 3,793
|
Post by Brian on Mar 17, 2011 23:24:01 GMT -8
We got the same ISP, but a different IP address -- one straight out of the Pentagon.I was surprised how little I could find on Google about the Naval Ocean Systems Center -- and by how many links I hit that were "forbidden" or only offered 20-year-old scientific papers for a fee -- but the NOSC address 140.185.96.57 with its provocative hostname, wakko.whs.mil, has been seen on other left-wing sites over the years. It visited the Montrose Peace Vigil message board at 10:09 a.m. yesterday. I don't have the ability to track how long IP addresses visit, unless they stay more than ten minutes, nor which threads are being read, only which departments. But it's pretty clear how they found us. The increased traffic parallels the repeated and frequent visits by search engines from Russia, Sweden, France and, of course, Google. As I write this, 25 of the 39 guests in the past 24 hours were Googlebots, scanning our content and spewing out links on the World Wide Web. After a year of recording visits by the individual Googlebots, I gave up, unable to discern any pattern. Still I sift through the failed comment spammers and the benign adware to note random humans visiting in just the past week from places like Holywell, U.K.; Saint Petersburg, Russia; San Francisco, Calif.; Toledo, Ohio; Altrincham, U.K., La Chaux, Switzerland; Marietta, Georgia and Rawlins, Wyoming. And the one from Auckland, New Zealand that entered the Entertainment section on two different occasions.
|
|
Brian
Administrator
Posts: 3,793
|
Post by Brian on Apr 18, 2011 23:01:03 GMT -8
Some of you may have noticed the huge number of guests on the Montrose Peace Vigil message board Info Center -- 136 at midnight -- when we had been running 45 to 60 visitors per day. About 80 percent of those IP addresses are the usual plethora of Googlebots -- plus scads of MSNbots from Microsoft's Bing search engine, which have been bombarding the board almost every day for the past week. The count peaked several hours later at 143 guests -- a new high -- but has since settled down below 100, still above average because of the MSNbots. They've driven down the ratio of Googlebots on the board, which are currently only 22 of the 80 visitors in the past 24 hours. Now when you type Montrose Peace Vigil on Google and Bing -- as well as entireweb.com in Sweden and Yandex.com in Russia, also frequent visitors -- a link to this message board is the first search result.
|
|
Brian
Administrator
Posts: 3,793
|
Post by Brian on May 26, 2011 23:24:22 GMT -8
Or I could spend $100 to install software like this for bulk searches...I finally had to give up my quest to identify every IP address that hits the Montrose Peace Vigil message board on Wednesday, when the guest count for the past 24 hours went over 200, about ten times the daily average we had only six months ago. Even when the board was averaging 100 guests per day, I could wake up each morning and run all of the addresses I didn't recognize that visited overnight in about 20 minutes. Administrators can read a constantly replenishing 24-hour log. I'd copy and paste each address on two free websites that tell me the location and Internet Service Provider, then whether the address has a history of comment spamming or other bad online behavior. Half of the guests here now are robotic U.S.-based spammers that post links on forums selling all kinds of pharmaceuticals. I set up this board to be as wide open as possible and we have yet to get one spam post, thanks to our host ProBoards' security features. Obviously, this URL is being circulated around the online drug community, and their programs are going to log on and try to post. It doesn't cost them anything. But they cost me too much time. When I could only look up three hours of guests in my allotted 20 minutes, I knew I wouldn't be able to keep up with the flow. I will miss keeping track of the worldwide search engines and finding the occasional surprising human and institutional visitors. Who knows, this could be the only forum that's been hit by both the Pentagon and the webmaster of Yoko Ono's Imagine Peace website.
|
|
Brian
Administrator
Posts: 3,793
|
Post by Brian on Jun 20, 2011 23:00:53 GMT -8
I finally had to give up my quest to identify every IP address that hits the Montrose Peace Vigil message board on Wednesday, when the guest count for the past 24 hours went over 200.. The daily guest tally stayed above 100 for another three weeks before settling down lately. In the past 24 hours, the message board has had 80 visitors, two thirds of those being the familiar bots from the Google, MSN, Yahoo and Wordlight search engines. I'm not tempted to resume tracking all of our guests. But for old time's sake, I checked today's and found human, nonspamming visitors from Valencia, Spain; Wayland, New York; Gainesville, Florida; Phoenix, Arizona; Sacramento and two Verizon IP addresses from the Sunland-Tujunga area.
|
|
Brian
Administrator
Posts: 3,793
|
Post by Brian on Jul 23, 2011 23:00:21 GMT -8
The msnbots that were so plentiful for three months have virtually disappeared from the Montrose Peace Vigil message board, so the Googlebots again dominate the guest count -- 24 of the 41 IP addresses that have visited in the past 24 hours. Other search engines still hang out here, especially Yandex in Russia, Entireweb in Sweden and Exalead in France.
After writing down every visiting IP address for two years, I can glance at the daily guest list and identify most of them by sight -- the search engines and the would be comment spammers. What about the rest? With the count for the past two weeks down to the levels we last had in March, I'm back to running some of the unfamiliar ones through the IP locator. And I'm seeing a lot of new guests who have no record of bad behavior on the Internet, including repeat visits from an American Red Cross office in Orange County.
In the past 24 hours, the board has had unidentified actual human beings visiting from Reseda, California; Buffalo, New York; Carlisle, Massachusetts and an unknown city in the United Kingdom.
|
|
Brian
Administrator
Posts: 3,793
|
Post by Brian on Aug 22, 2011 23:00:19 GMT -8
In the past couple of months, the message board had its first spam posts in our nearly three-year history. You didn't see them because I deleted them immediately. The one that broke our cherry was the typical link-only post from somewhere in China. (I didn't click on it.) The second spam, by an IP address registered to a condo association in Miami, might be the longest post I've every seen on a ProBoards forum. It solicited clients for an escort service, listing all the ladies' attributes and providing links, followed by an extensive help wanted section. The third one was written in Spanish with links to websites selling soccer uniform shirts, but it came from an IP address in Beijing that had no record of spamming. Continuing my monthly snapshot from the Info Center on the homepage: Currently, the board has had 54 guests within the past 24 hours, with 24 of those being our friends, the Googlebots.
|
|
Brian
Administrator
Posts: 3,793
|
Post by Brian on Sept 19, 2011 23:24:18 GMT -8
Thanks to Nancy for posting an announcement of Montrose Peace Vigil's first War Is Over Mending Circle on Yoko Ono's Wall on Facebook. No one can tell how our visitors find this message board. But in the hours since Nancy put up our link, we've received hits from IP addresses in Edmonton and Vancouver in Canada; Birmingham, Alabama; Totnes, U.K.; two in Beijing and one from Facebook in Palo Alto. None of them are currently listed as comment spammers or bots, so they're probably actual human beings.
My monthly mark from the Info Center: we've had 62 guests in the past 24 hours, 30 of those Googlebots.
|
|
Brian
Administrator
Posts: 3,793
|
Post by Brian on Oct 24, 2011 23:01:04 GMT -8
I was checking the Info Center on the homepage late Sunday when the guest count in the past 24 hours lurched away from the normal 75 to 204 guests in just two hours. We peaked at 236 Monday night. Also, the previous record number of users online at one time had stood at 18 for more than a year. Now it's 34.
The message board has logged more than 200 visitors in a day, mostly international comment spammers, but accumulated them much slower. This was a blitz. I ran the IP addresses and was surprised to find that all of them were registered to Amazon.com, which usually sends several bots here every day. This is apparently part of an intensive marketing survey -- another ProBoards forum I frequent that had 86 guests when I went to sleep listed nearly 300 when I woke up.
As I post, the surge has dropped from the Active Users in the Past 24 Hours. The rat has passed through the snake. The monthly Traffic Report marker: 101 guests, 24 of them Googlebots.
|
|
Brian
Administrator
Posts: 3,793
|
Post by Brian on Dec 1, 2011 0:00:55 GMT -8
I've been rather Occupied lately, so I'm late laying down the monthly Traffic Report marker, a snapshot of our visitors from the Info Center on the homepage. As I post, the message board has had 65 guests in the past 24 hours, 25 of those being Googlebots.
In the past five weeks, the number of daily visitors has ranged from a high of 113 to a low of 59.
|
|