We have a forum kindly provided on the Dicsourse hosting for open source projects. It has been fantastic for our community. We have plodded along with 20-40k views a month for a few years now (barring the time we needed to rate limit BingBot), then suddenly this week has gone crazy with over 8k visits a day.
Looks at the new “Consolidated Pageviews with Browser Detection” report it seems that we are being inundated with “other traffic”
I think on the hosted option I don’t have access to Data explorer plugin or all of the IPs. We can’t geoblock as we are a very international community.
It is good to hear that:
Our pageviews on the main dashboard still uses the legacy view so we are well over quota:
It is a bit confusing/worrying to see this spike. But the way I am reading this is that to actually see the underlying logs of what IPs are in the other traffic we would need a plugin?
Hi Julian! Apologies for the delay in responding here. As a hosted customer you can always reach out to team@discourse.org to get quick, personalized support from our team. We can also look at your site’s stats and settings directly to advise you.
That bump in pageviews does look impressive, and you are indeed over your limit. Don’t worry, though, we won’t start charging you more without talking to you first and helping you to get back under your limits.
There’s no report for gathering more detailed information around the pageviews. Nate linked to a topic that helps describe what ‘Other traffic’ typically is:
And to answer this question:
We don’t provide IP addresses in any report. As a hosted customer, we would need to pull your web server logs. And even then, I’d ask if you truly need those?
If you’re concerned about page view limits, I would suggest you write in to our support group as Tobias mentioned.
If you’re trying to mitigate some of those requests, I would look at Controlling Web Crawlers For a Site . As noted there, badly behaved bots or crawlers which spoof Google or Bing bots won’t be slowed by that.
And finally, if you use Google Analytics, we published a new guide a little over a week ago on How to investigate bot traffic using Google Analytics . If you use that, any feedback you have will be greatly appreciated.
It seems to be starting to calm down, though considerably higher than before. Hopefully the trend will continue.
We have tried crawler slowdown when we were being spammed by Bing, but there is no indentifieable user agents for the new traffic. Also as a very international community we can’t geoblock.
I didn’t know it was possible to put Google Analytics, if this becomes a real problem we may need to consider this. Though it would involve thinking about community privacy first.
For now I’ll see if it continues to regress towards the mean.
welcome 
