Brian
Administrator
Posts: 3,790
Member is Online
|
Post by Brian on Feb 1, 2023 0:00:13 GMT -8
The number of guests visiting the Montrose Peace Vigil message board in any 24-hour period has been running in roughly the same range since I pulled the plug on advertising 13 months ago. Except, that is, for the 31 hours that a glitch at our host ProBoards knocked out my ad free subscription on New Year's Eve and New Year's Day. You can see how the IP addresses that populate the ads on each page inflated the peak guest count in January 2023: - Most guests: 86 on Jan. 1 (46 when ad free)
- Fewest guests: 14
- Current reading: 21
If our ad free service hadn't been interrupted, the message board would have certainly set a new record for ad free page views in January -- a sum just 80 views shy of November's: - Total page views for the month: 8,351
|
|
Brian
Administrator
Posts: 3,790
Member is Online
|
Post by Brian on Mar 1, 2023 0:00:30 GMT -8
The accumulated daily visits by guests -- as seen at the bottom of the homepage -- dropped sharply in February 2023 to record lows since I removed the ads from the message board last year: - Most guests: 33
- Fewest guests: 7
- Current reading: 22
However, those guests and message board members combined to view a lot of ad free pages in only 28 days -- not as many as the previous three months, but more than in October and just 32 fewer views than in September 2022: - Total page views for the month: 6,221
|
|
Brian
Administrator
Posts: 3,790
Member is Online
|
Post by Brian on Mar 31, 2023 23:00:11 GMT -8
The tallies of daily guest visits in March 2023 rebounded from February's low marks -- right back into the familiar range of previous months in this ad free era: - Most guests: 46
- Fewest guests: 12
- Current reading: 21
Yet ad free page views dropped 12 percent from February's total despite the three extra days: - Total page views for the month: 5,466
|
|
Brian
Administrator
Posts: 3,790
Member is Online
|
Post by Brian on Apr 30, 2023 23:00:28 GMT -8
The high and low numbers of guests accumulated in any 24-hour period fell in April 2023, but not to the record lows of February: - Most guests: 34
- Fewest guests: 11
- Current reading: 11
But April's guests viewed many hundreds more ad free pages: - Total page views for the month: 7,070
|
|
Brian
Administrator
Posts: 3,790
Member is Online
|
Post by Brian on May 31, 2023 23:00:13 GMT -8
Ho hum, I know -- the daily tallies of guests keep bouncing within the same range month by month as they did in May 2023: - Most guests: 42
- Fewest guests: 8
- Current reading: 22
Still, page views increased again in May to the third highest total in the 18 months that the Montrose Peace Vigil message board has been free of ads: - Total page views for the month: 7,642
|
|
Brian
Administrator
Posts: 3,790
Member is Online
|
Post by Brian on Jun 30, 2023 23:00:20 GMT -8
The highest and lowest numbers of unique guest IP addresses visiting the Montrose Peace Vigil message board in June 2023 during any 24-hour period were better than any month since January: - Most guests: 46
- Fewest guests: 14
- Current reading: 24
Ad free page views were close to the totals for last March and October, down considerably from the highs of other recent months: - Total page views for the month: 5,062
|
|
Brian
Administrator
Posts: 3,790
Member is Online
|
Post by Brian on Jul 31, 2023 23:00:20 GMT -8
July 2023 had a day with the highest number of guest visits to this message board since last September's peak of 59 accumulated guests. My usual report is below, but I want to mention that the daily guest tallies in July overall ran about twice as high as the tallies of the days I recorded in previous months. - Most guests: 57
- Fewest guests: 16
- Current reading: 36
July also had a record number of ad free page views. About 2,300 of the views listed below came in the midnight hour of July 8. It wasn't the first time that a lone search bot (or very few) presumably took a snapshot of every page here. - Total page views for the month: 8,734
|
|
Brian
Administrator
Posts: 3,790
Member is Online
|
Post by Brian on Aug 31, 2023 23:00:24 GMT -8
The last week of August 2023 brought the highest numbers of guests to this message board since the ads were removed at the end of 2021, as seen below. The peak number is three times the previous highs in the ad free era, but well shy of April through June 2021 when bots from China visited two or three days each month in swarms ranging from 2,200 to 4,200 unique IP addresses accumulated over 24 hours. - Most guests: 188
- Fewest guests: 17
- Current reading: 166
Those excess visitors came from Singapore via Amazon Data Services but I cannot find out which client in its Southeast Asia region is using Amazon's internet service and presumably its data processing capabilities to search this place and other ProBoards forums. They've been arriving in small groups every day, looking into every department on the homepage. As I expected, the Montrose Peace Vigil message board set a new record in ad free hits: - Total page views for the month: 9,471
|
|
Brian
Administrator
Posts: 3,790
Member is Online
|
Post by Brian on Sept 20, 2023 23:00:29 GMT -8
I will post my usual report at the end of September, but for now I'll just note that the bots from Amazon Data Services in Singapore keep visiting every day - for a full month at this point -- keeping the running tally of guests over 24 hours at unprecedented highs since the Montrose Peace Vigil message board went ad free nearly two years ago and the cookies and ad trackers went away. I started recording the highest and lowest guest accumulations every month in the original Traffic Report in 2011, but it's been a long time since I explained where those unique IP addresses come from. Only Anni and I as administrators can look up the IP addresses of members and guests. There are lots of websites that will allow you to learn the location and the internet service provider of any IP address -- I use www.iplocation.net/. This message board has always gotten hits from bots that collect links for their search engines. They're easy to identify. Google was a much bigger presence a decade ago, as were Microsoft's Bing and Yahoo. Yandex in Russia, which swelled the guest count in a spectacular fashion for a several weeks in 2010, still shows up today. My favorite search engine is BoardReader, whose crawlers aggregate content from forums like this, blogs and similar websites across the internet. And, of course, real human beings using consumer ISP's come here too, thanks to the search engines, like the IP addresses from Poland and Northridge that I saw yesterday. I read the papers, as it were, so I've been aware of the explosion of generative artificial intelligence applications in the past 10 months. These commercial AI programs gobble up everything on the internet to train themselves in ways their creators don't even understand. Perhaps AI is also generating our new traffic pattern.
|
|
Brian
Administrator
Posts: 3,790
Member is Online
|
Post by Brian on Sept 30, 2023 23:00:53 GMT -8
I've gotten in the habit of randomly checking 15-minute guest accumulations when I see four or more guests online since the Amazon Data Services bots started showing up. Usually, some if not all of them are IP addresses with the same numbering sequence from Singapore. Nonetheless, I believe that the Montrose Peace Vigil message board is getting more hits from all kinds of visitors, contributing to these uniformly high number readings over 24 hours in September 2023: - Most guests: 221
- Fewest guests: 40
- Current reading: 97
September was a rare month this year when I did not observe one web crawler (or very few) rack up 1,000 to 2,500 page views in just an hour or so. Yet the board had the sixth best month since it became ad free: - Total page views for the month: 7,457
|
|