A user piffy noticed a sudden doubling of anonymous pageviews on their Discourse instance, suspecting it might be related to a recent instance rebuild or version update. They shared a screenshot showing the spike and asked if others experienced similar patterns. nat suggested checking plugins and the previous version, while Ed_S noted they don’t see the same issue and attributed a past spike to a shared link. piffy confirmed their instance is up-to-date and provided plugin details, expressing openness to a bug but seeking advice on investigating the traffic source. Jagster speculated it could be bots using false user agents, referencing SEO-related activity, and suggested checking Nginx logs for more insight.
I noticed this happened the last two days:
I recently rebuilt my instance so just wondering if it could be a change in the way pageviews get counted? Does anyone else see this pattern?
If not, do you have any suggestions on how to investigate what’s causing this? Most of my anonymous traffic is coming from google and there doesn’t appear to be a spike in the referred count for any specific topic.
Any thoughts are appreciated
Could you share your list of plugins/themes?
What version did you upgrade from?
I keep the instance pretty up-to-date. I don’t know how to check what the previous version was. It was probably previously updated about a week before this most recent update.
I’m thinking the phenomenon is not a bug (but I don’t want to rule that out as a possibility). Any tip on how to investigate the source of this traffic is appreciated
Nginx is logging everything. My guess is it happened by bots, out there is some SEO stealers sites that use false user agents.
