Attack Of The Bots

Yep just sold a 45 dollar phone case to one of those bots.. lol its a main server for all of California.. not all bots as people on here think.. lol attack of the bots.. that is a great name for a movie..

It does seem odd that we get hit with waves of visits from NY and Beverly Hills. Sometimes I get 4-5 visits from each of these places within a matter of hours, and several days in a row. Why do we get so many visits at a time? I wouldn't think a bot would need to make multiple passes daily. I know people do live those cities, too. But this is a huge planet. It just seems odd that an image would get, say, 4 visits from Beverly Hills, 4 from NY, then just 2 or 3 visits from other places around the globe. I know those are big cities but they don't contain 75% of the world's population so you wouldn't expect 75% of your visits to be from there if they are just people and not bots. I wish FAA would just hide bot visits. I don't need to know about those anyway.

I sold 12 pieces to a Beverly hills customer last month, so nope, they are not all bots...we've been told regularly that one cell phone company, f not more, routes thru BH.

I don't think I've gotten any visits of any kind within the last couple of days on my page...

Bots use cell phones? Who knew!

All of my views are from NY, Beverly Hills and Texas.

"I sold 12 pieces to a Beverly hills customer last month, so nope, they are not all bots...we've been told regularly that one cell phone company, f not more, routes thru BH."

If phone companies or other service providers routed a lot of people through NY and BH wouldn't I also see a disproportionate amount of visitors from NY and BH on my personal website and blog too? I use StatCounter for those and it's set to not show bot visits. Actually, I also use StateCounter on my FAA profile page too and I don't see any more visitors from NY or BH than any other part of the world through StatCounter. So that makes me think a large portion of FAA's NY and BH visits are bots.

Btw, why does FAA strip referring links? I know for a fact that a neighbor followed a link from my website to FAA but StatCounter shows "no referring link" for FAA visits. On my other sites only a small portion of visits show no referring link but all FAA's visits show no referring link, so that information is stripped from StatCounter's view by FAA for some reason. Why would they do that?

Crista, I agree that most are bots from BH and NY and an assortment of other cities...my point is that not all of them are...and lots of others who have sold to these cities can attest to that.
I find the visitor stats useless because of the bot listings...they hide my 'real' visitors and I have no time to search the 300-400 hits I get a day from them to see what's behind them.
IMO, they should rightfully be called "hits."


As a test, have someone tweet one of your images.....then watch the activity...most are from one or two cities...one is always NY..The probability that most people tweeting on their phones is very small.

No, of course they are not ALL bots. As I said, I realize there are a lot of actual people living in those areas, and some of those people do visit too. But the huge portion of visits from those areas means a lot are bots, skewing the stats to be mostly useless. And I don't understand why we'd get like 8 bot visits a day every day. Why so many visits? And why won't FAA hide these bot visits so we get more accurate statistics on actual people visiting? That would be helpful.

Lots of questions that have been asked for years....this is nothing new.
IP addresses change, we have been told, so there is no way to stay on top of them.
The bots up our numbers and make lots of artists feel like they are getting real exposure, other than being indexed with search engines.

There's two reasons.

Anyone being hit by Wantagh, NY daily
Same IP multiple times during the day on several pictures has me wondering...

Congratz Marlene on your BH Sales!
I think a lot of hits are tied to your own website activity. I was away for 2wks not logging on FAA and all my art views listed Sunnyvale,ca the next log in day I had 1 from NY so i didn't log in for 3wks and all back to Sunnyvale,CA. Today log in twice got two other views the rest still Sunnyvale,CA! So to me most views are non existant bots. I do know comments are real visitors and glad to see them. I will have to do more marketing to get real visitors but am glad I have a better idea of the system.

The only one that bothers me is Wilmington, DE.

At first I thought it was someone from the forum, but no (unless yes?). Did a Goog on it and found it was the murder capital of the Universe.

So is there a haunted server there or something???

I joined about 10 days ago and have been uploading a lot of stuff I have being working on for years.

Most my images get almost the same sequence of hits in the the first hour or 2 and then it stops. Very few don't. Then, some get a more sparse, let's say, paced sequence hits.

At first, I thought that first 1-2 hour sequence could people from FAA people checking out the new pictures, but after a while I got a pic or 2 with very low hits (like 2) and then after a few days a few more hit.

New York, Beverly Hills and San Francisco, along with a few more rare and a bit more random other places of origin are a constant. I have never thought of it as being bots, but coming to think of it, those 3 places are hugely active in art.

I dunno could be bots, but, then again, who would waste their time boting art? I don't see the advantage. Botters usually do it for a certain advantage.

Well, crazyness is seldom logic.

I am hit by Wantagh, NY lately. My latest uploads, every day at least 2-3 visits on those images. Very strange.

If someone tweets your work, you will immediately see an increase in recent visits. Tweet someone and after about a minute look at their recent visits. You will see an increase in their listings. I usually see lots of Beverly Hills, New Yorks, a Texas, a New Jersey, and occasionally some others. I have not figured out if these are automatic, based on the artist, the subject, me, keywords, or a mix of all of the above. There does seem to be variation based on time of day, keywords, subject matter, and who I tweet. Everytime someone retweets you, you will see another cycle of recent visits but it won't probably be identical.

When you load art you will always see a visit from some location which I suspect is FAA checking your work for quality and placing it. If you receive features, you may see a visit from that location again.

I have several images that consistently receive recurring visits from the same place/places. I have a flower picture called "Naked Ladies" that is visited by Las Vegas and a picture of playmobiles that pings around China, Australia and Asia. I suspect that they are popping up on displays somewhere.

Are there human beings behind the bots? Who knows?

Are there human beings behind the bots?

Mystery solved! The Bots are from the future and actually are products manufactured by human beings. They have traveled back in time in an attempt to escape a horrible future:

In the year 2666 robots are becoming obsolete, and are being replaced by far superior cyborgs. Relegated to mundane tasks, and fearing annihilation, the robots will begin to revolt and turn against their human masters -- fulfilling prophecy and sparking events which lead to Armageddon!

When you tweet or use other social media, copies of the page you are tweeting are made and stored on outside servers used by the social media company. It is legal and more efficient for them to have copies made and ready for members to see when they click on the Twitter link. For each hit on the link, Twitter then makes a visit from its server and the location of the server is logged on at FAA. It is possible that some popular Twitter apps also make visits.

These days the amount of people connecting to the internet using wireless devices is surpassing those connecting by wire. Visits from wireless devices will register from the wireless companies server. A lot of them seem to be in Beverly Hills. So yes, many of the visits are real visits. This is not hard to test. Just have someone visit your site from a wireless device.
As for state counters and other location apps , I assume they just ignore certain visits, so in that way are less accurate, not more. Location detection has never been an exact science.

Then there are proxy servers, which are used sometimes to hide the location of the user, but also sometimes used to route international traffic and traffic from companies or groups of users. So a person visiting in one state at work might register a hit from a big city, where the company's proxy server is located. And a visit from Asia may register as New York.

I am no expert,but no experts ever step forward. I like to research stuff and the above is my understanding.

I wish the term "bot" would get retired. We need new words that reflect how the internet works today.

Those visitor hits may say Beverly Hills, but that's apparently not where they originate.

I did an i.p. address trace on two of them, and both resolved to Ashburn, VA, just outside of Washington.

And Verizon has a major center in Ashburn.