Most users ever online was 6,588, 27-12-2019 at 09:52.

[Mike OReilly]

Originally Posted by Delancey

By running out of date software that hasn’t been updated since 2017? That is how they support it? Why don’t the fix the broken counter?

If they are making sufficient revenue from the existing setup, why would they invest more? But if you're honestly asking, then you're asking in the wrong place. Go ask the owners.

[ThereAndBack]

Originally Posted by Mike OReilly

If they are making sufficient revenue from the existing setup, why would they invest more? But if you're honestly asking, then you're asking in the wrong place. Go ask the owners.

I will tell you why, as someone in the software industry. One day this software, which hasn't been patched in years, will be exploited. A security breach will shut this place down and expose owners to liability.

Running a serious website without paying attention to security practices is bad.

[alctel]

Originally Posted by ThereAndBack

I will tell you why, as someone in the software industry. One day this software, which hasn't been patched in years, will be exploited. A security breach will shut this place down and expose owners to liability.

Running a serious website without paying attention to security practices is bad.

*gestures at most of the internet*

[Mike OReilly]

Originally Posted by ThereAndBack

I will tell you why, as someone in the software industry. One day this software, which hasn't been patched in years, will be exploited. A security breach will shut this place down and expose owners to liability.

Running a serious website without paying attention to security practices is bad.

So go tell the owners. My point is, the site is clearly achieving the objectives of the owners, otherwise they would change it. That's the only metric we can be certain of.

[AKA-None]

Originally Posted by Island Time O25

Awhile ago IT friend of mine told me that the rough rule of thumb ratio is 1:10, 10 bots for every 1 real live guest visitor. Don't know if that still holds true.



It's easy to attach a flag to each visitor showing a country of his server. Many forums do that. One would be surprised what shows up and how often.

Bots show up from everywhere because they don’t come from servers but from compromised computers everywhere

[AKA-None]

Originally Posted by GordMay

? ➥ https://www.keycdn.com/blog/web-crawlers
What is a robots.txt file? ➥ https://www.keycdn.com/support/what-...obots-txt-file

That is not a forced requirement it’s a polite request

[Jammer]

Originally Posted by Delancey

I think the bot thing is interesting.

Do I understand correctly that you guys are saying that most of the online users are bots, and that because of the decline in the number of bots, the site is healthier than ever? Is that what you are saying?

Or are you just saying that the counter has always falsely over-reported the number of active users making it appear as though the forum is more actively used than it really is?

The first one seems insane. The second one seems nefarious. Why would the people who own the site purposely and deceptively misrepresent something like that?

Which one is it?

Measuring unique genuine human visitors is really, really hard.


Unique = not counting anyone more than once
Genuine = not counting human attempts to fake out the site for various fraudulent reasons

Human = not counting bots, whether seeking to index content (google), scrape content (for various legitimate and nefarious purposes), or attempting to compromise the site


Running a web site that actually works properly and is secure is difficult and expensive and requires ongoing investment. Most sites can't afford best practices

[Startracker]

Originally Posted by Delancey

I can see a few spare diehards still linger, there used to be a ton of really great people here but they all left?

Seems like they all jumped ship about two years ago and took all their knowledge and expertise with them. Sad.

What happened to this place?

This is happening across the board on many forums. I think the format of forum in general is dying a slow death at the moment. I find it much better than Youtube/Instagram/Tik Tok, but I like reading and writing.
Another forum I'm on in a completely unrelated hobby has dropped over 50% max user online from the all time high. The die hards are still there thankfully.
The hardest hit in my opinion are private trackers. They are hard to get into these days, and in general I would say the content levels have dropped 75%+ since I was active in the scene.

The same in blogging, it's all taken over by video hosted in the cloud and viewed on a platform controlled by others and you have to cater to algorithms that control viewership. In another life I had a travel blog with about 100k viewers at peak, no advertising, no YouTube algorithms to cater to, I had only to cater to the things my audience liked, which since I started out by doing what I liked, were often one and the same.
I LOVED the time and care it took to develop a set of photos, and to write. I HATE trying to do video. It seems to me to be trading quality of an image for quantity.
Then again I remember this same feeling and same shift on Usenet before forums. I liked the change overall, forums are better than usenet to me.
So it might just be an age thing, forums are for old people. I think partly it's also a fatigue thing, the longer you are on a forum, the more you see the same old same old arguments, and topics. Just the way of things.

EDITED TO ADD:
I also got overrun by bots from time to time. That was an endless pain in the butt. So was updating the server software, fiddling with settings, making sure the latest updated of the gallery software talked to the blog software and on and on.

Hindsight being 20/20, I thought no one looked at my work anymore, I had a subsection dedicated to old restoration work. Eventually life happened, I stopped maintaining the site, and let the hosting expire, then my laptop was stolen. At the time I didn't care. When people started reaching out to me via email, and I can only wonder at how many would have but didn't have my contact info, I realized that a lot of the information I collected was irreplaceable. The people I got it from had truly gotten old, or died. The images I spent months shooting, and weeks editing all gone. Like a big part of who I was simply ceased to exist.

If I was a You-tuber, none of these concerns were mine. Upload, and forget. It would have (so far) always been there.

[DMF Sailing]

Originally Posted by Jammer

Measuring unique genuine human visitors is really, really hard.


Unique = not counting anyone more than once
Genuine = not counting human attempts to fake out the site for various fraudulent reasons

Human = not counting bots, whether seeking to index content (google), scrape content (for various legitimate and nefarious purposes), or attempting to compromise the site


Running a web site that actually works properly and is secure is difficult and expensive and requires ongoing investment. Most sites can't afford best practices

And to do it, you employ people who suss all that out for a living

EDIT: HAPPY NEW YEAR EVERYONE!!

[goboatingnow]

Originally Posted by DMF Sailing

And to do it, you employ people who suss all that out for a living

EDIT: HAPPY NEW YEAR EVERYONE!!

Assuming you are generating that type of income

[CaptTom]

Originally Posted by Startracker

If I was a You-tuber, none of these concerns were mine. Upload, and forget. It would have (so far) always been there.

Unless it was on MySpace or any one of a number of other platforms which are no longer active, or no longer exist.

Probably my biggest concern with the pace of change on the internet is that so much is lost each time a "new thing" comes out and everyone abandons the old.

You could pick up a family photo album after 50 years and it's still the same. Everything we put on the web today will be long gone in that time.

But in practice the time frame is even shorter. You post a photo to Facebook or your phone's cloud photo storage, and it scrolls off as soon as a few more are posted. Both Apple and Google do have a feature which pops up photos from this day x years ago, but even that will go away at some point.

I don't have a solution. I'm not a luddite, but there's always a down side with rapid change.

[wingssail]

Originally Posted by CaptTom

Unless it was on MySpace or any one of a number of other platforms which are no longer active, or no longer exist.

Probably my biggest concern with the pace of change on the internet is that so much is lost each time a "new thing" comes out and everyone abandons the old....

This is a concern of mine as well. The tech giants provide such wonderful services for us to use, for free and we act as if they are permanent.

But we are strictly at the mercy of the tech giants. They can at any time decide to discontinue that service and we might lose everything. In fact it has come close to that for me already in one instance:
I started loading photos for my blog using "hello" which was suggested by Google Blogspot. Then they move them all to Picasso, then they moved them all to Google Photos, which is now being discontinued. Each time I worried about my photos. Well, it is happening. all my original photos still appear in my blog, so they are somewhere, but looking at my Google Photos archives/albums the "Hello" photos are nowhere to be seen!

AND, Google has no technical support that I can contact about this. It must be that they view this as a "free service" so they don't proviide support for it.

And I am powerless.

I use Blogspot for my stories and I realized that on any given day they could simply announce that Blogspot is going away. They might provide some application for users to use to save their blogs, but if it does not work very well I feel that I'd be out of luck, no support, a free product, and anyway, how do we know that we'd be able to use the exported files to restore the blog to another platform? We don't. We're at the mercy of Google.

I'd pay for a service if it came with an iron clad guarantee with stated provisions for the eventuality that it might be closed down and support provided with levels of service for the whop product.

[SeanPatrick]

Originally Posted by wingssail

all my original photos still appear in my blog, so they are somewhere, but looking at my Google Photos archives/albums the "Hello" photos are nowhere to be seen!

AND, Google has no technical support that I can contact about this. It must be that they view this as a "free service" so they don't proviide support for it.

And I am powerless.

Maybe this will help?

How to download your Google data

"You can export and download your data from the Google products you use, such as your:

• Email
• Documents
• Calendar
• Photos
• YouTube videos
• Data about registration and account activity

You can create an archive to keep for your records or use the data in another service."

[glanrock]

Originally Posted by GordMay

? ➥ https://www.keycdn.com/blog/web-crawlers
What is a robots.txt file? ➥ https://www.keycdn.com/support/what-...obots-txt-file

The answer to this is located on Google's documentation. "A robots.txt file is used primarily to manage crawler traffic to your site, and usually to keep a file off Google, depending on the file type:"

https://developers.google.com/search...d/robots/intro

This isn't my area of expertise, but I am roughly familiar with doing things to keep servers safe from exploits. However that is not the same as running network infiltration protection on firewalls, they are the ones keeping the near constant scans from getting inside.

[Steadman Uhlich]

My ears were burning....(as I was mentioned above in this thread). I just want to assure my friends here in CF that I am alive and well, and that any rumors of my demise have been exaggerated (to paraphrase Mark Twain).

My thanks go to the kind folks who remember me well, including DonL, grantmc, and Jammer who mentioned me in this thread. I appreciate your good wishes.

But, while I am not on CF as much as in the past, I am still with you all in spirit.

As for sailing, the Covid Pandemic smashed my own travel/sailing/crewing plans, or took the wind out of my sails for now. I have not gotten Covid yet, and practice the CDC protocols and am so far healthy. I am double vaccinated and boosted, but still cautious, for good reasons (as most should be), and have turned down some nice offers to crew with others, because it would mean being on a boat with strangers (not family) for long periods, possibly far offshore, and possibly ending up in a remote location during a Covid restricted time there. So, for the time being, I am focused on other things. If I owned my own boat, I would be out sailing each week.

In any case, i appreciate the good thoughts from CF, and will try to add more good input (content) in the future. For now, I am swamped while working on my personal projects (artwork, graphic designs, writing, etc.) and of course still learning something new each day.
________
Again, thanks to everyone for their friendly concern, or messages or thoughts. I return the same to you. I hope everyone has a healthy, happy, good year ahead.

Sincerely,
Steadman