Bleeping Computer's Popularity

Scroling down to the forums page, I noticed:
 

14030 users are online (in the past 60 minutes)
22 members, 14007 guests, 1 anonymous users

 
and this got me curious.  Who are you guys (you 14K people)?  Real people?  Bots?  Since they are not logged in, it's hard to say.  And this prompted me to search:
 

bleepingcomputer popularity

Not gonna name names, but a media bias rating website said that Bleeping Computer is LEAST BIASED and HIGH CREDIBILITY (as if I didn't know).

So to everyone contributing their BYTE to BC, Happy New Year!!!

I've sometimes wondered that myself but never sufficiently to go and do a search on it, but a Happy New Year to you too when it comes.

Chris Cosgrove

I know nothing about haw "bots" work ... but couldn't you tell if a Bot was looking at the website by how fast it scrolled thru topics?? I assume it would be unnaturally fast.

My understanding is that bots works as a huge horde (bot farm).  Each does a little at a time not to raise suspicions.  But overall, the horde is all over the place somehow testing for a point of entry.

You will see the same on most fora that show visitor numbers that haven't filtered out the non-person (bots/scrapers) and the guest visitors.

Why not filter them out? For one thing it can help you see how many are visiting but not joining, (for another it makes your forum look very popular).

The non-logged-in ones will mostly be the webcrawlers and webscapers for the many search engines, Google, Yahoo, Bing, DDG, etc.etc.

They are everywhere, constantly collecting whatever has been posted so that they can catalogue it and display it in their search results.

I'm not sure just how may scrapers each search engine deploys, but it will be a lot for each engine.

Most of that kind of metrics data is kept hidden from view where only the forum Admin/Owner can see it all.

Where I can access such stuff, on a Discourse hosted forum where I mod, I can access 54 different reports of that kind of metrics data - if I want to, including:
 Capture.JPG   13.02KB   0 downloads

That one has filtered out the crawlers/scrapers and the bots, so that it only shows actual people who visited but didn't log in.
There is also:
 Capture2.JPG   11.45KB   0 downloads

Which shows how active the logged in members have been.

Or you can go for a full overview including the crawlers and bots:
 Capture3.JPG   11.24KB   0 downloads

Plus another 51 of them showing different metrics of how the site is being used (or not used) so that the admin can know how it's being used and can tweak things.

Edited by Nukecad, 30 December 2024 - 09:14 AM.

Of course it is popular, lots of good, useful information, and people (I suppose most of us are people, more or less :-) who are fun to chat with and helpful when help is needed, indeed, happy new year halfway through, many happy returns. 

BTW, after signing in (twice, perhaps I looked like a bot the first time) another popup popped up and asked for a Microsoft password. I do use a Microsoft email address and I have a password for that, but I did not see any reason for needing that here, so I closed it. Then it appeared once more and again I did not tell it anything, just closed it, and then it stayed away. Comments?

BTW again, does anybody else find it amusing that when I log in to use Copilot (which I have been having lots of fun with) it asks me to prove I am human, even though of course it is not human? 

I don't know anything about Copilot, but the BC site asks to confirm you are human every so often.  It does that even to Grinler.  It does it to me every time I log in, and sometimes when I open links too quickly.

I have no idea why you were asked for a Microsoft password.  It shouldn't be doing that.