Question about weird traffic surge at SLUniverse

I am wondering if anyone has any idea what could be causing a strange traffic surge on my site. This morning when I logged into it, it said 1800 guests had been active. I looked and they were spread out throughout individual forums - several hundred in each one. Currently there are 576 guests active in my forums, which has been fluctuating in the hundreds all day - and they are spread out within individual forums as well, so it does not seem to be an anamoly. The traffic stats for the site show a spike as well, but there is no pattern to where they are coming from - other than having an unsually high percentage of Netscape 7 users, which I found odd (50%, and this cannot be explained by Firefox, which is broken out separately). I have experienced surges before during certain events (SL outages, THere imploding, etc..) but overall the site has very healthy, but relatively steady traffic - so I can't figure out for the life of me where some huge surge like that would come from. Any ideas?

The Badgeometry Wiki has been attacked over the past several days. Maybe they have turned their sights on the next popular SL-related website? Might want to contact the folks at badgeometry.com and compare notes.

Eeek I had not thought of an attack, thanks for the suggestion. I will also check with my ISP as well, though they seem to be pretty proactive about that kind of stuff.

Congrats, Cris. You must be popular if the asswipes are after you.

Why the hell would anyone attack a Wiki site? How incredibly lame - the script kiddies attack the script reference. Thanks Devlin, I suppose it is a dubious compliment.

Please tell me there's a backup of badgeometry.com's wiki. I would cease to exist without it. If it remains down I'll setup another one somewhere and take the google cache of it.

There is a particularly thick robot doing the rounds that will tend to show as Jetbot - have you seen anything like that in your logs? I've encountered this going round and round sites just for the sheer hell of it. I only mention it as I've seen a few sites get a stupid amount of hits in a very short period of time from it - it seems to hit with great intensity when it does. It behaves very strangely indeed.

Oh yeah, do a search on it - the site the robot is spidering for is private and nobody seems to know what it's going to be (http://www.jeteye.com/).

Just an observation....aren't both SLUniverse and the Wiki both listed as links on one of the SL homepages? If there's an overly zealous/braindead spider on the loose, I would think that once it hit the SL site, it'd likely be flooding all the sites linked from it too.


- Newfie Pendragon

OH by the way Christiano..I tried contacting you through the "find" menu and putting in your name..nothing came up last night. I must have put that H in your name..maybe that's why. Cristiano rather.