Quote:
Originally Posted by photon
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. |
So Russia (or China I guess, but more likely Russia using a cloud service from HK) is keeping tabs with what is said about the war on social media. This forum is social media, and an easy one to keep up with because it's one static thread.
So let's speculate?
What can you do with information like that? Use it as to create propaganda directed at the West. Some ways include for example identifying things people worry about ans trying to amplify those worries. You can use it to identify common divisions of opinion and try to for example stir that into a fight in the West (turning differences in opinion into groups that hate each other). Just in general, you can use, in theory at least, information from threads like this to create propaganda that supports an opinion that's favorable to Russian interests.
They can also use metrics from threads like this all around the net to measure Western engagement with the war. Less people reading and posting -> less interest in the war -> less likely that the West will keep supporting Ukraine.
....it's so great how the internet has become such a good example of a scifi dystopia.