In some forum software, and I think this applies here, the admin can declare a definition of "bot" such that those sessions don't take up as many resources as they might normally do. You'd see in the footer of the page this kind of thing:
Quote:
Users browsing this forum: BigEd and 3 guests
or at the footer of the front page
Quote:
Registered users: BigEd, gilhad, Google [Bot]
Of course, the identification of a bot (usually from user agent) is no guarantee, but over on anycpu this does help keep resource usage down. We have some 50-ish bots declared, and 30+ of them have visited in the past month.
Sometimes it's the case that someone somewhere is trying to fetch the entire forum. This usually works poorly because every page is cross-linked many times, with each post having a URL, each thread, each page of each thread, each user and each sub-forum. There are also links to next and previous threads. You need a smart crawler to fetch a forum efficiently, whereas anyone can have the (not so) bright idea to just do a recursive fetch.
A thread with many posts will, in my experience, accumulate views ever-faster. Perhaps a reason not to have mega-threads too often.
And then, there are sites like hackaday, hacker news, reddit, other forums, which have large audiences, and which can easily cause a massive burst of traffic usually for a short time but with a long tail.
None of these are any sort of problem, so long as the server has the resources and the costs can be covered - we should be confident that Mike is on top of all that.
Certainly we should fully expect that everything we post here is public, is accessible, and will probably find its way into databases, private or commercial or otherwise. And into the current crop of large language models, for sure. Again, I can't see this as a problem, because we always post publicly, and knowingly so.
Edit: having said that, for my own amusement I try to keep an eye on the max-concurrent-users-ever statistic found on the front page. I see that it did recently take a big leap:
from Most users ever online was 761 on Sat Dec 19, 2020 1:05 am
to Most users ever online was 1425 on Mon Jan 29, 2024 11:53 pm