[Ninety-Six]

Maybe I've just looked at the exact wrong/correct times, but I've only seen this number of guests continue to grow. They linger on threads and never seem to move off. This includes dead hours.



I may just be paranoid but this seems unnatural to me and looks like something could be breaking.

[Dr.Panico]

It could be bots, or just a glitch in the counter.

Knowing modern Internet, it's most likely the former.

[Ninety-Six]

Dr.Panico, on 18 February 2026 - 07:32 AM, said:

It could be bots, or just a glitch in the counter.

Knowing modern Internet, it's most likely the former.

But why so many all of a sudden? This isn't exactly the most active forum out there anymore.

[Reaper_Man]

I've been seeing this on the sites/forums that I run (some that are even more dead than this place), it's mostly all AI related bots. Whether it's crawlers indexing pages, or someone asks ChatGPT how to write in CON and it spawns 1 billion AI agents all searching the forum simultaneously.

[Ninety-Six]

Reaper_Man, on 18 February 2026 - 12:34 PM, said:

I've been seeing this on the sites/forums that I run (some that are even more dead than this place), it's mostly all AI related bots. Whether it's crawlers indexing pages, or someone asks ChatGPT how to write in CON and it spawns 1 billion AI agents all searching the forum simultaneously.

Oh, I see.



so justified paranoia then

[Reaper_Man]

Not sure I understand what's paranoia about it. Bots and crawlers and spiders have always been a thing. The only thing that's changed here is the volume of them. I don't think there's any reason to assume something is breaking, you just likely never paid attention when it was 1 or 2 digit "guests", instead of 3 or 4.

[ck3D]

It is because Duke has been dead and so Proton's Techbots have been feeding off his corpse. Thankfully, it's 2026 and, for the past couple of years, our hero's body has been mostly G-Fuel, thus ensuring him a postmortem victory by shortcutting of the robot parts, poisoning of the organic parts, and suffocating mediocrity of the scenario.