Unusualy high number of post views

[loua_oz]

My small site usually gets 20-30 genueine views a day, pretty much the same public (students of Japanese).
Plus about 50 touches by google, msn and baidu bots.

Monitoring who is online, there is no significant variation: 15-20 users, guests and bots, hardly ever more.

Since around August 1. number of views (for the flagship thread, not all content) started going up by 1000s a day, without anyone visibly logged in, not even as guests.

Earlier on, I noticed that numebr of views per thread goes with number of pages it visited: for example, 10 pages, 10 posts each, if someone goes front to back, that increases the counter by 10. Even that can't go in thousands a day.

Anyone seen that?

How would FaceBook guests, following a link on FB access? Stealth or shown as guests and counted?

[tbworld]

You need to look at your server access logs, if you have access to them. Then you can see who is requesting what.

[loua_oz]

Thanks, I could download .gz data for August 2013.

Win 7 has no utility to read it. Tried free downloads of WinZip 17.5, they appear intrusive, uninstalled them (downloaded them from 2 sites).

Geez, I thought that unzip comes with Win.

Will try later.

[CAG CheechDogg]

There is nothing to worry about in your thread's views going sky high, when a search engine's spiders and crawlers visit your site they might be hitting these threads like crazy, especially if you have facebook and twitter integration in your forums.

It can how ever cause problems later on if too many spiders and crawlers are "kicking back" on your site. As long as you are not getting any errors with connecting to your database you will be fine.

[ozzy47]

If it really concerns you, I would look at the server access logs, as tbworld suggested.

Tip: Use Notepad or another text editor to open the GZ file. Many files are text-only files meaning no matter the file extension, a text editor may be able to properly display the file's contents.

[loua_oz]

Thanks, without getting any db errors I will shelve this question.
Notepad could open the file but it was unreadable.
Unzipped it (WinZip download and uninstall after that) and, unless I was after proving someone specific had accessed the site, there is no point in sifting through 65MB of unformatted ASCII data.

[tbworld]

Unfortunately, I was going to mention that you will need to use some utility software to analyze the logs. It is almost impossible to see the patterns of access data unless you really know what you are looking for.

There are a some free log analyzers that you can use on windows.