Whats your thoughts?
Hi Andy!
I've often pondered this myself. Looking back on that date, there was some discussion on whether to select a Raven Tour or RST, and JimK was taking the first rides on his new Nomad in his freshly-created Catskills Nomad gallery topic, but I don't think either of these would have been enough to account for the spike in site traffic. If it had been a US-based Forum, November 25th would have been Thanksgiving Thursday, and much of the 'Net traffic would have centered on discussion of the "Black Friday" sales ("Black" as in the color of profitable ink, keyed to sales profits, rather than red ink, indicating a loss; one of the biggest online sales days in the US each year and the kickoff of the holiday pricing specials; take note of you're a bargain hunter). Lots of bargains in the US that day, but business as usual in the UK.
...or do you know something different
I wasn't an administrator in 2010 (I was an unregistered gues for a couple years previous to that time), but I'll hazard a guess in hindsight:
I'd guess the site was being heavily indexed by search engines that day. In the last few months, I've noticed there have been multiple connections on the same topic by indexing crawlers ('bots, spiders) based in China. A major source is Baidu, commonly regarded as the "Google of Asia" and is described further in their FAQ here:
http://www.baidu.com/search/spider_english.htmlGiven these 'bots' behaviors, it would be logical to assume repeated access of the same topics is for the purpose of capturing screen shots or html trawls for the Green Dam-Youth Escort censorship system (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Dam_Youth_Escort ), used to screen and block certain content from Chinese users. Starting 1 July 2009, the Chinese government required personal computer makers to bundle software that filters Internet content (no longer mandatory but often included by PC makers; end-use is voluntary), and Baidu's spiders were and are documented to be part of this effort. There
was a 'Net-wide increase in Baidu crawler traffic on that 25 November 2010.
Our Forum is being indexed by Google and I saw Bing in there also. Ask.com and Yahoo make appearances from time to time. When all the search engines crawl at once, it boosts our user-counts accordingly; Google Images makes a difference as well. This is happening in other Forums also; itcertainly does skew hit-counts as a result.
It has been fun to watch where the indexing traffic comes from, and when it spikes.
That little notice at the bottom of the top-level (home, entry) page says "Most Online Ever: 175 (November 25, 2010)" and doesn't delineate between registered users and guests. Crawlers are seen and listed by the Forum software as "Guests". Based on present indicators, this is my guess at what caused the traffic spike that date.
All the best,
Dan. (...we're being waaaaaaatched; not always a bad thing)
