Interesting Trainz Discussion Forum Statistics

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pware

Trainz Veteran
I just spotted this after scrolling down to the bottom of the opening Forum page. I rarely venture "down there".

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Currently Active Users

There are currently 2951 users online. 76 members and 2875 guests
Most users ever online was 7,899, Yesterday at 12:26 AM.

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Red emphasis is mine. The time is local from my timezone. (AST)
 
That seems to occur at least once a year or so. If this is true, then this is good news for N3V.
 
This does seem like very good news - if its possible to rule out that they could potentially be ad bots? I’ve occasionally noticed irrelevant ad forum posts here and there, that are swiftly removed.

If it is truly, well, real people then that is certainly a good look especially considering how much N3V have mentioned the mobile market brings in. The new mobile version could possibly increase that stat.
 
My years of working for an ISP tells me that those are almost certainly probes from the Chinese bot nets. Chinese criminals maintain a massive network of PCs that use millions of IP addresses to probe anything on the Internet with a live IP address. The probes consist of login attempts using long lists of usernames and passwords. Since some areas of the forum do not require a valid login to access threads they show as guest when they access them. If you have access to your own router's logs, you can see the attempts made against it. Use the Arin website to see what organization the IP addresses were assigned. Don't be surprised to see IP addresses from countries outside of China. There are millions of bot infested computers around the world.

Instructions are here: https://www.arin.net/resources/registry/whois/#search-ip

https://www.zdnet.com/article/chinese-police-arrest-operators-of-200000-strong-ddos-botnet/

William
 
Interesting. It was also interesting to read that the Chinese authorities are now starting to crack down on Chinese operated botnets which are doing as much, if not more, damage to their own networks.

The article had a link to another on using complex passwords vs simple passphrases. It is now looking like the security experts are moving away from recommending complex passwords (e.g. P@SS10nFru1t) which can be difficult for humans to remember and relatively easy for todays computers to crack, to easier to remember passphrases (e.g. The_boy_stood_on_the_burning_deck) which are much harder to crack - BTW neither of those passwords/phrases are part of my forum login.:)
 
If you click on the active users you get a list, seem to be an awful lot of "guests" viewing archived threads, which says to me probably bot nets.
 
I agree with clam1952. A very large number would be spambots, search engines, and such. Web sites is a big part of what I do (for a living) and I can tell you that a GREAT amount of "hits" or "visitors" are not actual human visitors. When human activity is tracked (button clicks and such) counts go way down.

From "ZDNET" publishing:
Bots, in general, are estimated to make up roughly 37.9 percent of all Internet traffic. In 2018, one in five website requests -- 20.4 percent -- of traffic was generated by bad bots alone.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/bad-bots-focus-on-financial-targets-make-up-20-percent-of-web-traffic/
 
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Looking at the numbers viewing on the main page, all except the open General sub-forum are sensible numbers but the General at this moment in time has 937 viewers. Enough said.
 
Something else to consider is that a lot of the "guests" might indeed be valid Trainzers. I peruse the forums everyday but rarely login unless I want to post something (as I'm doing now) or view the odd restricted thread that I follow.

Maybe less Bots than you think?

Cheers,

Derek
 
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