- Local time
- Today, 06:26
- Joined
- Sep 28, 1999
- Messages
- 7,900
There are lies, damn lies and statistics!
Some of you may wonder why a competing website appears to have large numbers of guests and juicy numbers of online members at any one time, when compared to here, despite getting half the traffic. Well, I have the answer for you.
This is the setting I have in the back-end:
Anyone who is inactive in a 15 minute period is classed as offline. Comparing that with our nearest competitor, they use 60 minutes. So, if I look at a snapshot at this point in time, they have 28 members online while we have 21. It looks like they are busier, right? So what happens when I do this:
Well, this happens!
If we level the playing field, you can see how we really compare.
Now to Guests...
Before the recent changes, guest counts here were often 2,000+. Yet they have plummeted to, at this moment in time, 303. Why the disparity? Well, the old software was vulnerable to hackers, who want to do SQL injection attempts, break into the site and steal your passwords. The vast majority of those "Guests" were in fact bots trying to hack the site. They knew the older vBulletin 3.8 software was end-of-life and leaky. I made lots of back-end tweaks to help reduce the risks, but they don't know that so keep trying to hack. If we take say 2,500+ guests - 300 real guests, we are left with 2,200+ hack attempts in any 15 minute period. That is a lot of hacking!! Since our new software is patched against all known exploits, there is no point in trying to hack. There are no known exploits. You only have to go to the hacker forums to see tutorials on how to hack vBulletin 3.8. It is quite scary really!
The guest count when I equalised the stats timeout period was 1,449 at our nearest competitors, and 1,009 here, despite them getting half the traffic. If we look at the ratios and pretend they have the same amount of traffic as us, they would get roughly 2,900 guests compared to our 1,009. Assuming parity of guest ratios, that means 1,891 extra guests are unaccounted for on their older software platform, every hour. That amounts to 680,760 extra unaccounted for "guests" every year, given equal traffic. Now I don't know for sure the real cause for why they have more unaccounted for "guests" than us. I will leave that up to you to decide. But if they are hack attempts, it takes only one of those to get through and break the vault. Then, the data gets spilled. Just remember to always update your passwords regularly.
I hope the above helped give a clearer picture of Access Worlds real standing regarding traffic and security, without being led astray by each site using a different statistics time period. If you want to be at a site that is fast, secure and has the most Access visitors, you know where to come!
Some of you may wonder why a competing website appears to have large numbers of guests and juicy numbers of online members at any one time, when compared to here, despite getting half the traffic. Well, I have the answer for you.
This is the setting I have in the back-end:
Anyone who is inactive in a 15 minute period is classed as offline. Comparing that with our nearest competitor, they use 60 minutes. So, if I look at a snapshot at this point in time, they have 28 members online while we have 21. It looks like they are busier, right? So what happens when I do this:
Well, this happens!
If we level the playing field, you can see how we really compare.
Now to Guests...
Before the recent changes, guest counts here were often 2,000+. Yet they have plummeted to, at this moment in time, 303. Why the disparity? Well, the old software was vulnerable to hackers, who want to do SQL injection attempts, break into the site and steal your passwords. The vast majority of those "Guests" were in fact bots trying to hack the site. They knew the older vBulletin 3.8 software was end-of-life and leaky. I made lots of back-end tweaks to help reduce the risks, but they don't know that so keep trying to hack. If we take say 2,500+ guests - 300 real guests, we are left with 2,200+ hack attempts in any 15 minute period. That is a lot of hacking!! Since our new software is patched against all known exploits, there is no point in trying to hack. There are no known exploits. You only have to go to the hacker forums to see tutorials on how to hack vBulletin 3.8. It is quite scary really!
The guest count when I equalised the stats timeout period was 1,449 at our nearest competitors, and 1,009 here, despite them getting half the traffic. If we look at the ratios and pretend they have the same amount of traffic as us, they would get roughly 2,900 guests compared to our 1,009. Assuming parity of guest ratios, that means 1,891 extra guests are unaccounted for on their older software platform, every hour. That amounts to 680,760 extra unaccounted for "guests" every year, given equal traffic. Now I don't know for sure the real cause for why they have more unaccounted for "guests" than us. I will leave that up to you to decide. But if they are hack attempts, it takes only one of those to get through and break the vault. Then, the data gets spilled. Just remember to always update your passwords regularly.
I hope the above helped give a clearer picture of Access Worlds real standing regarding traffic and security, without being led astray by each site using a different statistics time period. If you want to be at a site that is fast, secure and has the most Access visitors, you know where to come!
Last edited:
