I'm wondering why this forum is getting swamped with guests lately. Two days ago, on October 22, it was down due to "connection problems" and when I came back to it today, it said that there had been 569 guests online that day. The last time there was site traffic that extreme was back when one of the C&D's--possibly the second--had been ordered against TSL, and there were only a little over 200+ online that day.
Lately, it seems like tons of guests, whether people or bots, have been on here, and not for any particular reason, either. Nothing important happened on Oct. 22 (in fact, the most recent post as of this writing was on Oct. 11), yet it was overloaded with users, more than any other day in this forum's history. What's worse, this wasn't a one-time thing. Over the past several months, more and more guests have been on here, and if the "connection problems" were any indicator, then it's too much traffic for this site to handle. Can someone please explain what's going on?
Huh. Honestly, my best guess is bots. We've definitely had our share of problems with them. Some of the recent connection issues had to do with some outdated and vulnerable files on the site that needed to be cleaned out. But when the site came back up, said things had been handled and in most cases deleted.
This kind of info isn't exactly my area of expertise though.
Well, thanks for shedding a little light on the situation. I'll continue reporting any bots I see.