I'm not really lost but the board seems to have slowed down

Yvonne Smith said:
Yes, same for me. Any idea what is happening, @Ken Anderson ? It says we have over 16,000 visitors on the site right now, so it must be some kind of an attack that is hitting this site for some reason.
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I doubt we're directly under attack. Various nefarious projects, often based in China, will attack hosting platforms, Internet hubs, or regions of the country, so when our web host is in these target zones, we might become part of it for a time, and we might feel it. I doubt that anyone with the capabilities of engaging thousands of bots has decided to take the Seniors Only Club down, though. Slowdowns could also be part of an attack anywhere between your own ISP and our host ISP. Often, the targets will be the major Internet hubs.
 
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I posted this in SOC 1.0, but I'll do it again, in case you're interested.
There are others, but these are a few. I don't know if they all get their data from the same place or if they are independently collected, nor can I personally assess their accuracy, but they can be fun to watch. I prefer the NETScout one. By placing your cursor on a dot on the map, specific information will pop up.
 
As a rule of thumb, when there are a lot of "guests" showing up here, and I see that most of them are shown as "Viewing unknown pages" or "Viewing latest content," I will assume that we're not a specific target. When thousands of "guests" are shown as "Registering," then I worry because that suggests that a bot network is trying to gain access. That doesn't mean that they have gotten in or that they will get in, but it means that they're trying. Given that these are automated attacks, with no actual person making decisions, when they can't get in, they give up and move on. Even when bots are trying to get in, that doesn't mean that someone is specifically targeting the Seniors Only Club, as it's more likely that they are just targeting anything on a network with a login.

Also, not every "guest" is a nefarious bot. Some of them are real people who have come across the forum through a link or a search engine, while others might be search engine bots that are too small or new to be identified as "robots." Anyone can download a free search engine app or buy one, and if they have the tech savvy, they can set about indexing the web, or a part of it, for themselves. Unless they limited their search considerably, they'd soon run out of storage space, but their bot searches wouldn't show up as "robots" because they would be unidentified.

We are being accessed by various AI searches as well, and these searches are being identified as "robots," although there may be some that are unidentified. This isn't anything to be concerned about because they don't have any more access than anyone else who isn't logged into an account, and as more people are turning to AI chats rather than search engines, and, indeed, search engines are returning AI recommendations rather than search results, they can be a source of new members, too. Web people are optimizing their sites for AI as well as search engines.
 
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