I Do Believe We've Been Invaded

[Huinesoron]

Originally Posted by Mithadan

I did not notice that. Huinesoron, check on your end, and I will make some inquiries as well.

Okay, so I didn't link to the Downs on any of the videos (which have no views anyway due to being semi-private), or on the Libretto document. I posted one link on another forum back in 2020; I've gone back and removed that, but it doesn't seem a likely source. That was this link to page 9; I don't know if there's any way to check which posts are specifically being viewed?

Originally Posted by Galadriel55

I did share a link to that thread specifically with a few people, but I haven't posted it anywhere. I'll ask if any of them put it up somewhere else. Indeed, if all those views were real traffic, that would be quite the audience. Is there anything else about the thread that might attract them? Would the sheer number of hyperlinks somehow serve as a magnet?

Or the number of pictures (mostly hosted on Imgur), or the number of YouTube links specifically? But I don't know of any actual mechanism for a bot farm to get hold of that information. AI scrapers (like the Wayback machine) would be a possible answer, except I think they work the other way round - they'd cluster somewhere because lots of incoming links lead them there, they wouldn't lurk there because of how much is going out.

I also don't understand why they would. They've sent 4000 bots to our thread today because, say, it links to lots of YouTube videos, and then.. what? What's the profit? What's the point? They're not even posting!

If the Downs tracks visiting IP addresses it might be possible to check them against lists of known scrapers. And if there's a tool to look at what exactly is getting the views (eg, are they coming in through the front page or straight to a post?) we could try fixing that specific thing. All I know how to see is the viewers per forum, not per thread.

hS