I have noticed the high # of guests viewing the thread at times too and I figured it was just because it was high interest and maybe was popular in some searches...
But I did a bit of digging in the logs and I'm starting to think it's some kind of bot scraping this specific thread.
First I just did a quick search in the logs to find out the top IP addresses making requests to the forum and there's 2 that are far and away more than any other IP. Way more than web crawlers. Both IPs are located in Hong Kong and are owned by Alibaba Cloud HK (a cloud provider).
So I looked at the requests, and they all look like this from the logs:
Code:
x.x.x.x - - [31/Mar/2024:04:27:39 -0400] "HEAD /printthread.php?page=160&pp=20&t=186835 HTTP/1.1" 200 - "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/78.0.2813.123 Safari/537.36"
x.x.x.x - - [31/Mar/2024:04:27:39 -0400] "GET /printthread.php?page=160&pp=20&t=186835 HTTP/1.1" 200 6648 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/78.0.2813.123 Safari/537.36
"
printthread.php is to view a thread without all the extra forum formatting, all the printthread log entries I checked (not exhaustive by any means granted) were from these IPs and for this one thread.
t=18835 is this thread
The page numbers are all over the place (and I'm not sure what s= is).
So it looks like some software is setup to scrape this thread constantly. From Hong Kong. ALL the time. WHY?!
Part of me just wants to block the IPs, but do I want to incur the wrath of state level hackers lol.
So weird.
Anyway, going to bed, try not to start an international incident.
EDIT: Hm the s= part doesn't show up for some reason, it looks like /printthread.php?page=4&pp=60& s = 665789674a3a3a21e6bab0fd43ffa1ec &t=186835
It might just be a random salt to prevent the forum software from caching the requests.