Full Version: 63 simultaneous users !
That is quite a jump from the previous high. Where did they come from, Mike? I am curious.
There was a big party at 4:45 AM and you weren't invited! 
The quick answer: search engine spiders. In particular, Googlebot and Inktomi (Services MSN, Hotbot, About, Looksmart, and more).
The technical answer as to why there was such a quick jump:
Search engine spiders scour the net looking for fresh content. The more often your content changes, the more often you're spidered, and the better search results you will have.
The problem (up until a couple of days ago) was that spiders don't like "dynamic URLs". That's the part of the web address you see that is like "?s=&act=Post&CODE=02&f=22&t=824". Once a spider sees that, it doesn't count the page.
This is mostly because, as you can tell, the spider can send a lot of visitors to a site in a short period of time. Inktomi claims they will not request a page any more than once every 5 seconds, and I think Google is once a second. Too many visitors too fast on a poorly-written PHP script could overload the server, or cause unfair resource hogging. Our script, however, is designed to be light on the server, and the spiders won't do much to it.
Well anyways, up until a few days ago, all of the links on our homepage contained dynamic characters, so spiders would never get to the actual forum. I found a way to make spiders grab the whole forum.
Basically, the spiders are tricked into thinking they are spidering static content, when they are in fact spidering dynamic content.
Take a look at these two links:
Both of the links take you to the same place (top link, bottom link).
A script interprets the first slash after the "php" as a question mark and then alternates every other slash between an "&" and an "=" and then forwards the browser to the correct page. Since it has slashes, spiders assume it is static and chew it up.
This is the main reason I made the All Unique Topics Page.
I hope that explains it a bit!
Mike
The quick answer: search engine spiders. In particular, Googlebot and Inktomi (Services MSN, Hotbot, About, Looksmart, and more).
The technical answer as to why there was such a quick jump:
Search engine spiders scour the net looking for fresh content. The more often your content changes, the more often you're spidered, and the better search results you will have.
The problem (up until a couple of days ago) was that spiders don't like "dynamic URLs". That's the part of the web address you see that is like "?s=&act=Post&CODE=02&f=22&t=824". Once a spider sees that, it doesn't count the page.
This is mostly because, as you can tell, the spider can send a lot of visitors to a site in a short period of time. Inktomi claims they will not request a page any more than once every 5 seconds, and I think Google is once a second. Too many visitors too fast on a poorly-written PHP script could overload the server, or cause unfair resource hogging. Our script, however, is designed to be light on the server, and the spiders won't do much to it.
Well anyways, up until a few days ago, all of the links on our homepage contained dynamic characters, so spiders would never get to the actual forum. I found a way to make spiders grab the whole forum.
Basically, the spiders are tricked into thinking they are spidering static content, when they are in fact spidering dynamic content.
Take a look at these two links:
CODE
http://www.americasdebate.com/forums/show.php/act/ST/f/22/t/824/view/getnewpost/s/
[url=http://www.americasdebate.com/forums/index.php?act=ST&f=22&t=824&view=getnewpost&s=]http://www.americasdebate.com/forums/index...w=getnewpost&s=[/url]
[url=http://www.americasdebate.com/forums/index.php?act=ST&f=22&t=824&view=getnewpost&s=]http://www.americasdebate.com/forums/index...w=getnewpost&s=[/url]
Both of the links take you to the same place (top link, bottom link).
A script interprets the first slash after the "php" as a question mark and then alternates every other slash between an "&" and an "=" and then forwards the browser to the correct page. Since it has slashes, spiders assume it is static and chew it up.
This is the main reason I made the All Unique Topics Page.
I hope that explains it a bit!
Mike
Thank you very much, Mike. I appreciate you taking the time to teach.
This is a simplified version of our main content. To view the full version with more information, formatting and images, please click here.