What is with the upsurge in New visitors?

[UniQueLyEviL]

I'm just curious.
Was there like a specific viral video or discussion about old school anime? The golden age.
Where'd y'all come from? HI HEY HELLO NEWBIES!!

[Daniel]

Hi. I noticed that to, and while I'd like to say that we just got really popular, the reality is that after looking into it I found that most of it seems to be from bots such as OpenAI opening tons of connections to the server while doing their web scanning. If I can find the time I'd like to do something about this, but for now at least you basically should just ignore the user counts that the forum shows. Sorry to disappoint...

[davemerrill]

I see some of the view counts are ridiculous, it definitely points to automated something doing something.

[runesaint]

hmmm.. (amusing myself with the idea of the 'personality' of an AI trained by repeated visits to old school otaku....)

[runesaint]

Huh. You aren't joking. The idea that, when I check on that post, that not just me, but NINETY THREE others are actively looking at my post from a few months back...and that the picture I took has been viewed over a hundred and fourty -thousand- times @.@...

Kind of weird to think that we are 'training' LLMs...

[Daniel]

Some of you may have noticed that this site was down for the past few days. My apologies if that caused any inconvenience. Actually what happened was that the traffic from those AI bots got to be so huge that the web hosting company shut down our site... I've got the site back up now and I've got some ideas for how to deal with this long term - just need to find the time to implement. Will try to do it within the next few weeks because those AI bots are just going crazy...

[runesaint]

I admit that I find this interesting. Are they doing this to -every- website? Every page? At least ninety four separate LLM examining the site at the moment that I was looking? I am picturing some program looking at that exact graphic that I uploaded thousands of times... to see if it changed?