The forum is extra slow and ....

[ImFreeman]

and this guy's thread keeps getting more and more views. Strange he is coming close to shannons journal discussion thread in number of views,

http://subliminal-talk.com/thread-7571.html

I don't want to say this guy is spamming the forum in some way to wh0re out views but, it would be wise to know wtf is going on ....

[Life]

Next level detection of bs

[Benjamin]

Catman suggested it was the username which makes sense if people are searching Disneyland and it could be coming up.

Is the forum slow for anyone else? It was for me last week for a few days but has been normal for me since so I assumed it was fixed.

[Lowe]

I don't know... the thread has about 200 times more views than the average thread at that post count. Seems unlikely that about 175,000 people so far stumbled upon here by mistake while searching for Disneyland. It was compared to Shannon's Journal Discussion thread but more stunningly, that one has over 2000 posts. This has 20. Something seems off.

Also, perhaps this huge increase in traffic is what was slowing down the website?

[CatMan]

I've noticed how terribly slow the forum is lately, it's awful. I get error messages, too.

CLEARLY, something is up.

My only other theory, is that with him commenting, doing threads, liking on posts, each time the keyword phrase "dis*ney*wor*ld" keeps popping up as a result. So, search engine spiders from all over the world are spidering and grabbing it, and coming back all the time to re-index especially his journal page due to the high instance of that phrase on there, obviously. Hence explaining the ridiculous view count there on that thread alone. My bet, is it is most likely tons of search engine spiders. He may need to do a name change, if it's affecting the forum like this.

Either that or the robots.txt file needs to be edited a bit after taking a look at the traffic logs. That should clearly tell which spiders are causing trouble. Back in the day, I had major trouble with Baidu spiders spamming the hell out of me and slowing my stuff down. If spiders, are indeed the culprit and not some banned member, lol.

[eternity]

If search engines are really sending that much traffic to this site, Andrew can take a look at Google analytics and see where the traffic is coming from and see exactly what pages it is going TO.

From what I know of SEO, search engines stopped giving as much credit to sources from forums, as it used to be a major blackhat tactic to increase a sites visibility on the search engines. Google's panda and penguin update long since made forum sources obsolete forms of SEO. And if I'm not mistaken, hummingbird update actually causes penalty if these tactics haven't been cleaned up, in an effort to de spam the Web

Plus, you would think things like "benjamin" or "yeah" or "dissonance" would cause the same type of trends in their respective journals. As those are common words, directly used in usernames on the forum.

But I must say I am mighty suspicious myself. There do exist software that send massive amount of traffic to websites. It's a form of malicious attack, along the lines of hacking but without compromising your security. It just floods the system.

I implore IML to look at Google analytics and see where the traffic is being directed from. It's pretty easy to spot something suspicious.

[Lucius]

I thought I was the only one having issues with the site. I started noticing this too about a week ago.

Regarding Disn***and.USA, I thought Catman had the answer to it then I typed the name in the search engine. Subliminal Talk did not feature in the first TEN pages of the search results!! Assuming it came up within the results after the tenth page, will that still increase his view counts even if I did not click on it?

[eternity]

I thought I was the only one having issues with the site. I started noticing this too about a week ago.

Regarding Disn***and.USA, I thought Catman had the answer to it then I typed the name in the search engine. Subliminal Talk did not feature in the first TEN pages of the search results!! Assuming it came up within the results after the tenth page, will that still increase his view counts even if I did not click on it?

It doesn't work like that. You have to visit the page for the view count to go up

[Minititan]

I snapshotted the forum yesterday. That thread had 216,000 views. Today it is at 224,000. Shannons journal discussion has gone up only 6000 views since yesterday and Shannon's journal thread has had a lot of posts since I took the snapshot. With all the hype for AOSI V2 and Shannon's experiments with the sub it makes sense. A normal E2 thread though, 8,000 views in a day.

Google DisneylandUSA, sifted through pages and couldn't find the forum.

Google "DisneylandUSA journal" and the forum is the top result but his actual
Journal is the 3rd on the list

Something fishy as hell is going on with that thread. It's the 3rd most popular on the site.

Considering there are forums with triple the posts with around 10-14k views in total and this one just jumped up 8,000 in a day when not a lot is happening on it. I think 1 or 2 posts.

Maybe asking disneylandusa if he would consider a slight name change to something like dis.neylandUsa to reduce potential google data hits or whatever, I have been getting the error quite frequently and the forum was insanely slow this morning (UK Time)