Are most of your visitors bots?

[NeoMetallix]

I get between 5,000-10,000+ visitors a month but most of them are viewing old OLD topics that they'd for sure have to dig through to find. No real person would be reading these old irrelevant topics.

Do you get this as well? The majority of guests not reading current stuff, just old/irrelevant/weird stuff? All I can think of is these aren't real people despite the forum showing when search crawlers are viewing the forum.

 

[Shortie_]

In most cases, I do get a lot of bots trawling my forums but I feel a lot do as most of the time, they are search engine bots so that is not always a bad thing.

On one forum I co-own right now, we have it set to show members, guests and bots and in some cases, the bots do outweigh the members and guests.

 

[Page]

Yes, most of the numbers that I see are bots, from a topic that has been posted and then feed from there they return to bots viewing the site. It's hard today if there are or not as they show guests from then again, as Staff/owner you can tell via the resources you have.

I see it in all forums and sites anyway.

 

[zappaDPJ]

I'd say for every genuine member I get somewhere between 50 and 500 bots viewing, depending on the forum.

 

[cpvr]

I get between 5,000-10,000+ visitors a month but most of them are viewing old OLD topics that they'd for sure have to dig through to find. No real person would be reading these old irrelevant topics.

Do you get this as well? The majority of guests not reading current stuff, just old/irrelevant/weird stuff? All I can think of is these aren't real people despite the forum showing when search crawlers are viewing the forum.

I can tell that a lot of my visitors aren’t just bots since I’m tracking my referral traffic on Cloudflare and Google Analytics & the number of robots that are online through Xenforo.

It’s a good thing if you’re having search engines spiders crawling your forum though. It means your content is being crawled and possibly indexed.

 

[Shawn Gossman]

For sure.

I think most "guest" visitors on any website are bots.

There are so many bots online, searching through content and with the rise of AI, they'll be even more of them scanning and learning or scraping your content.

I used to install those plugins that tell you all the bots lurking. It was definitely more than non-bots. But now I don't even look at the who's online section that much to be honest.

 

[Ravenfreak]

I feel like I get a lot of bots visiting my Joomla sites, but not so much my forums. However whenever I had a forum hosted on Proboards, I got lots of bots visiting my site.

 

[Baw$e]

I believe so. There is no way my site averages 40-50 guests online at all times. Most of them have to be bots. I've only got 80 clicks from search engines in past 28 days which ain't bad considering my rankings have been steadily improving.

 

[Page]

Bots are a thing, at least that they can't join however spam accounts can and this year I have had so many spam accounts joining left, right and centre 🙁 Even IPS has mentioned that they have doubled the amount of spam with their spam defence working extra time.

Bots need to be changed into real people and join 😛

 

[Shawn Gossman]

In all honesty though, I'll take a couple members of the hundreds of guests that might lurk. I'd rather have a couple of members who post than a 100 of them that do nothing.

 

[Bryn]

The social science forum flop of mine had mostly bots trying to crawl through it, but with the one I reopened there's a fair share between them and human beings...

 

[Shawn Gossman]

I logged onto my Off Topic Forum last night. It's brand new and aside from a few promotional posts, not a lot of people know about it yet.

It had 197 guests.

Most of them were Google bots! Quite a few were from sites like Ahrefs and services like that.

A few were bots used to drain bandwidth which I banned by IP.

Maybe one or two were potentially real people lurking.

 

[Cory]

Sometimes my guest viewing stats increase at random when 50 - 100+ guests are on my board. I don't know what type of bots these are, but I'm pretty sure they are. The highest stats for overall users on my board was 1708, but that was when my board was DDoSed. The high guest viewing ratios usually happen multiple times a week.