MyBB Community Forums

Something is wrong with the following 2 threads (from General Support):

1) Edit postbit with plugin
2) How to preserve changes in postbit template?

Screens:
[attachment=30511]
and after few seconds
[attachment=30512]

Check "Views" value. And after 2-3 seconds, please refresh page (F5). You will see that the value of "Views" is incremented in a strange way (check how many users view these 2 threads).

Something is wrong.

I think there are bots that are doing this, I've noticed weird views too, that only occur on some threads.

Probably, but it's weird. There are constant 7-9 guests. And ... why only for these threads?

Some forums/sub forums here have auto publishing newly posted threads to social sites. Once those threads posted all bots/guests from those social sites crawl to those threads. That occurs mostly in General Support forum.

I understand now. I apologize, but I found that the increment is abnormally accelerated.
So... choice of these threads is... somehow... random?

No, it's typically just the newest threads that get posted to Twitter or other social sites. For instance: this Twitter account posts new developments to do with MyBB.

I highly doubt that, the links on that account are only for the dev site and the number of views that threads get would need an account with tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of followers.
Given the discussion of attacks lately I'm more inclined to think it is a botnet of some sort.

It's plausible. I just grabbed the first bot I could find (I was a bit busy at the time) and didn't look at the links it posted. My bad, I apologize. But MyBB does have a lot of bots crawling it at any given time -- currently there's Google, Bing, and psock, but I guarantee you there's third party bots, search engine bots, and yes there's probably malicious bots given the recent downtimes, and the fact something like ~4,000 bots went on the blocklist.

Many thread views are caused by bots and crawlers.