abner

All very mellow, Gordon, but what happened to a response to:

"Most times" it is virtue-signalling? What are the good exceptions then, in your view?

"Most times" it is "woke"? What does "woke" actually mean to you, and why is it objectionable?

"Most times" it is "provocative"? To whom, and why do they find it so?

You raised these "most times" issues in your own post. What did you mean by them?

Gordon Barlow

Virtue-signalling is what we used to call "sucking up"
Woke is more or less the same thing - pretending to be "holier than thou"
Provocative is "looking for trouble" in an argument

The use of native place-names is fine and inoffensive in Wales where there are plenty of natives who use their own written language. But my context was that Canadian Skwxwu7mesh. There, the native Indians (American-Indians that is, of course) didn't have a written language - to the best of my knowledge. If they have had one all their lives, I'd bet it didn't have the figure 7 as one of its letters. I don't think we need to get hung up with an argument about the Skwxwu7mesh foolishness. If you don't consider it to be foolish, well, we will just have to agree to disagree.

[Late edit... I should probably have used the word "pandering" somewhere in the "Woke" explanation.]

BristolUK

So what word(s) do you use to describe when someone is socially aware then?

btar

I think I should apologise for the use of Skxwu7mesh, I wasn't trying to be provacative! But I do appreciate the explanations you have given; also the fact that a Chinaman is no longer used in polite cricketing circles - perhaps we needed one or two in the recent T20!
The use of symbols (orthographics) in languages has taken me on a canter around several web sites documenting the history, pronunciation and variations found in the North American First Nation's languages. I think the most notable point being that the use of a certain set of orthographics ensures that the language can be communicated by modern methods - typing, texting, email etc etc.

Gordon Barlow

A new shrimp for the barbie... As an old and former professional auditor, I'm interested in the phenomenon of BE's "bots". The mods have told us that the reported numbers of visitors to the threads are over-stated because they include "bots"... but a few questions arise. How are the bots identified as bots, and what percentage of the recorded visits do they account for? And is it the same percentage for all the BE threads? If not, why not? What is the purpose of the bots' senders? Who are they, and what do they hope to gain by sending them to a site like BE?

I visit other web-sites that apparently attract "bots", but those are said to affect only up-ticks and down-ticks of comments; so they must be a different kind from the BE ones. I'd be grateful for help in understanding their presence in BE's threads. Thank you in advance!

christmasoompa

Bots aren't different for each website. They crawl all websites and all pages. Some are spambots, that crawl looking for personal info (email addresses and the like) that they can then harvest, but search engines like Google or Yahoo also have bots (they'll crawl BE to index all the pages). Etc, etc. Browsers also have a 'pre-fetch' mechanism to try and speed up page loading, so they will account for traffic too. I know from my own website analytics that bots account for a huge amount of traffic but I don't think there would be any way of knowing what percentage they account for in thread views on BE.

We also get spambots that register regularly, you'll see their posts occasionally (usually nonsensical rubbish that is just computer generated) if we don't zap them in time, but thankfully they're usually pretty easy to spot and we can often get rid of them before they can post. But they'll be some of the traffic too.

Gordon Barlow

Thank you for the information. I didn't have a clue about them!. One question, though... How do you know from your personal site's analytics, that bots contribute a huge amount of visits? Can you determine where they come from - what country, for instance?

Jerseygirl

Many of the mods have been with BE for years. I have been a mod since the beginning of 2007. Therefore, quite often we can spot bots/spam before they post. There are certain ways we can check, as well spotting them through experience. Sometimes it’s just a case of spotting a new suspect username as they register. We have a pretty good idea of the percentage of bots/spam visits without looking at statistics.

Gordon Barlow

Just another word about the bots menace... The law of random accretion - adapted for the purpose - would suggest that although the reported figures for visits (to threads) are inflated by the presence of bots, the same percentage (more or less) will apply to every thread. Is that a fair comment? (I ask out of complete ignorance, but it seems reasonable.)

christmasoompa

Bots don’t index every page usually. If a thread is new or top of the page it’s more likely to have bots visiting it. But I’m bemused as to why this matters.

Gordon Barlow

I find it interesting that BE publishes numbers of views that it knows are fake. No disrespect intended at all, I assure you. It's just company policy, I guess. Also, I like it that I'm still interested in learning new things at my advanced age.

christmasoompa

You’ve totally misunderstood, they’re not fake at all. There is no way for the visit counter to distinguish between Mr Joe Bloggs sitting at home in Horsham browsing the forum, and a spammer just trying to flog stuff, and mods checking in on a thread after they received a report, and a spambot. All are visitors to the thread for different reasons and all are counted as such.

Gordon Barlow

Ah well, I'm surely not the only non-techie here who misunderstood the earlier explanation! To me, the term "bot" is short for "robot", which is a machine that follows instructions fed to it by humans. (In South Africa they call traffic-lights "robots" - or used to do.) The idea of robots' visits to BE threads being indistinguishable from humans' was and is astonishing and new to me. I accept what you say, of course; you are the expert. But - or and - please understand that the concept is staggering to us non-techies. We're not thick, necessarily..., but it sometimes takes us a while to cotton on to new-fangled gizmos! Thanks for the explanations.

christmasoompa

They are bots, non-human, but my point is there is no way of distinguishing them from human visitors. Each visit counts, regardless of who is behind that visit.

And I'm not technical at all, or any kind of 'expert'. I just have websites for my businesses so understand the basics of spam/spambots, and know how much traffic they generate. I'm sure you have the same with your blog. There's also various other sources, for example a BE thread could be linked to elsewhere on the internet, and that will generate a lot of traffic from non-forum members for whatever reason.

I don't really understand why we have the stats anyway tbh, I think they must have been added back when the forum was in its infancy and before spambots or mass spam attacks were a thing, so they were perhaps more relevant/accurate then. Now they're just pointless so essentially you need to just ignore them.

BristolUK

Not to mention that when starting a thread there are two views instantly