Concerning Numbers of Guests

[Cambrian]

Not sure if this is the right place to post this, but just wanted to bring something to mod attention while also leaving room for others to tell me I'm being dumb.

At the time of this posting, QQ has 20,652 guests showing under Members Online:

Click to shrink...

Considering that most of the website is locked behind a user account and even Spacebattles only has 8,656 guests at the moment, this feels really, really strange to me.

I guess my main concern is that these are bots of some kind and they will be a strain on the website's resources just by being around. So I wanted it to be pointed out just in case it was something that should or even can be investigated/dealt with.

Also happy to be told I'm a fearmongering moron and there's a perfectly reasonable explanation for 20k guests to just be chilling here.

EDIT: Its gone up another 600 guests in the past 5 minutes too.

 

[Random Omnipotent Being]

No, I agree that this is very sus. It looks like there's a lot of guests viewing random pages as quickly as they can.

 

[Cambrian]

No, I agree that this is very sus. It looks like there's a lot of guests viewing random pages as quickly as they can.

Click to shrink...

Honestly its likely just bots scraping the SFW section of the website since its the only part of the website they can reach as guests. Either to repost content on scam websites, or to feed into their LLMs to train the AI on the writing.

I assume it'll probably die down once they run through the rather tiny amount of content they can actually scrape as guests seeing as 90% of the website is locked behind having an account.

 

[Random Omnipotent Being]

Imagine trying to train your probably sfw AI in writing with a porn website. The number of guests is still going up and they're looking at profiles too.

 

[Sock_Puppet]

Yo what the fuck
(They're still here, too.)

 

[KaneLives]

The worst part is the number has gone up by almost 1500-2000 since midnight.

 

[Rin]

If they start affecting QQ's bandwidth costs, I expect the entire site will go private.

 

[OurLadyOfWires]

@Cambrian you are definitely not insane.

And it has been happening for a while now. I had a similar concern a while back:

Guest number bug/DDOS concern?

I don't know the first thing about technology and numbers, and to be honest I don't even know if I wrote the "ddos" acronym correctly. But every now and then, when I go to my thread, I see that the guest number is in the upper hundreds. And for all that I used to host this story in another...

forum.questionablequesting.com

The "hopeful" explanation is that people form SV and SB who don't want to create a profile here are still checking it out through cross-pollination or whatever you would call it. But the more pessimistic (and frankly, realistic) explanation is indeed LLM bots scrapping for content.

I'd appreciate if a site administrator could weigh in, maybe they have access to the IPs, or guest origins, or something else that could shed some light into this? (I know nothing about technology, so I don't even know the nomenclature of what could make this possible).

Other than that, yeah. Not something new, unfortunately.

 

[LurkingInTheDeceit]

I'd appreciate if a site administrator could weigh in,

Click to shrink...

Not an admin, but, we're aware of this, and it's not currently causing a problem server-side. We do think it's bots, though.

Tangentially, if you (or anyone else) specifically want an admin's help, it's probably faster to directly tag them, rather than waiting for them to pop their heads in on a thread. They're fairly busy, though, and there's only two of them around (tehelgee's gone back to sleep), so a mod can likely respond faster.

 

[Vasstago]

I want to point out that bots might not be locked out because of being guests from the NSFW part of the site. It depends on how tight the access is restricted.

For example if I have the direct link to an image posted in this site and open the tab to only to show that image, someone not logged in the site can see that image? In that way? As just the image in the tab.

Some bots that search for info search that way. Going into the directory for info stored in the website makeup.

If you want examples of this you can go to r/DataHoarder and they discuss about finding data stored that way by searching not through the UI but from the URL chain and directory of the site. Which is not necessarily locked to others.