Pageviews from Anonymous Users have exploded but Google Analytics showed no traffic growth. How to find about where the increase come from?

[fzngagan (Faizaan Gagan)]

@neounix

In my view, any engineer who spends at least 60 minutes of research on the Internet who has reasonable research and analytical skills will (1) find many references to operational reports (not theory) how much percentage of network traffic on the Internet is attributed to bots and (2) find a number of references which also quantify how much of that traffic is by “bad bots” who do not respect robots.txt.

Instead of repeating this time and again, it’s worth spending time on finding “why” those rogue bots didn’t affect such ginormous businesses that are being discussed.

Its not some newbies or enthusiasts you’re dealing with.

[sam (Sam Saffron)]

@zhenniwu

Is there a way to see the referring sites for anonymous users?

Back on topic, our container ships with NGINX.

Where does Discourse store and show logs?

When troubleshooting issues or errors with Discourse it is important you look at your logs. Here’s a listing of where they are and what’s in there. Your site domain Administration logs shown in the UI The Discourse admin panel contains several forms of logging: Emails that are sent, skipped, bounced, received and rejected are logged at https://=DOMAIN=/admin/email/sent and the neighboring tabs. Staff actions are logged at https://=DOMAIN=/admin/logs/staff_action_logs Email addresses and …

You can look through NGINX logs and see what IP the traffic comes from, what the user agent is and see a REFERER if it is there.

[zhenniwu (ZW)]

@sam thank you for offering the proper action items we can take on our side. I’ll communicate with our engineers and see what we can find from the NGINX logs. Will report back if we see anything unusual.

[chewxy]

In a bit of a twist, when I went to check the logs, there was a missing nginx log in the rotated files. So now I cannot know what happened in the period where @zhenniwu noticed the bump was happening.