Guests

[carolinarider09]

I rarely look at the bottom of the screen when I am on this forum.  I and just looking for new stuff to read and hopefully, give me good information and news and insights and just good stuff.  

But today, I did look at the bottom of the screen and it stated there were 1649 "Guests" and 6 Users.  That implied there were only six people accessing the forum that were actually "registered" users.  So, the implication is that there are over 1,600 "bots" attacking or accessing this forum.  Not people, but "bots".  

Is that a reasonable assumption?   If so, are the "bots" causing the access problems we have been experiencing over the last week?   If that is true, are there steps we could take to block these non registered users?  

It there are steps that can be taken, how can we "the registered Users" help.  

[Timbo1]

I rarely look at the bottom of the screen when I am on this forum.  I and just looking for new stuff to read and hopefully, give me good information and news and insights and just good stuff.  

But today, I did look at the bottom of the screen and it stated there were 1649 "Guests" and 6 Users.  That implied there were only six people accessing the forum that were actually "registered" users.  So, the implication is that there are over 1,600 "bots" attacking or accessing this forum.  Not people, but "bots".  

Is that a reasonable assumption?   If so, are the "bots" causing the access problems we have been experiencing over the last week?   If that is true, are there steps we could take to block these non registered users?  

It there are steps that can be taken, how can we "the registered Users" help.  

The 507 error many are seeing is most likely due to either the allocation assigned to valkyrieforum.com or actual physical allocation limits reached.  Either way it should be easily preventable with good proactive monitoring by the server administrators. It could probably be resolved by either cleaning up old or unnecessary files, increasing the quota or increasing the storage capacity of the server.

If it were some sort of DoS attack the network engineers & firewalls should / would be blocking them.  But with that low number of Guests, it's probably just a combination of valid web surfers and search engine spiders (web crawlers).

[Willow]

...
Is that a reasonable assumption?   ...

No.  If you pull up the board without "logging on" even though you are a registered user you will be identified as guest.  In that state you may read the board but will not be allowed to post anything.

Yes, the number of users may aggravate the storage shortage issue but at our height we did have many more users logged in.

Yes, i believe some cleanup or additional storage could help.

[Serk]

I suspect a large number of the "Guests" are search bots indexing the site. Google and hundreds of other search and indexing sites run millions of parallel instances of everything all the time to catalog the whole Internet...

[Willow]

I suspect a large number of the "Guests" are search bots indexing the site. Google and hundreds of other search and indexing sites run millions of parallel instances of everything all the time to catalog the whole Internet... 

I agree and that is a good reason for posting members not to include their email addresses of personal information in their posts.

[F6Dave]

If you don't login, you can no longer see the General board. I noticed this when connecting from my phone, which isn't logged in.

[carolinarider09]

I was looking at the “main page” once more and looking at the users online.  I forget the value, but when I looked four or five hours ago, the number of guests was around 600 or so.

Now (1820 EDT) the number of guests is back up to 1466 with only 6 real Users. 

I also noticed the list, under the post of users on line, which shows the “Most Online”.

Today: 3805.  Most on line ever: 3826 (February 4, 2026). 

I have not watched this before but I will in the future.

I had no idea there would be this many “bots” using the system.  They must be programmed to look for something.