A word to everyone using Advanced Traffic Statistics 
The last few releases have been the busiest in this add-on's history, and I wanted to step back for a moment and share where it's going — and to say thank you to everyone who has installed it, tested it, reported bugs and suggested ideas. I hope the recent updates have been useful on your boards.
From a visitor counter to a traffic intelligence platform
This add-on started life as a simple "who's online" widget. It counted visitors, showed a few charts, and that was it.
Then something changed on the web. Forums stopped being visited mainly by people. AI companies began harvesting community content at scale to train their models. Commercial crawlers started hammering boards for SEO data. And a new generation of scrapers appeared — headless browsers with perfect user-agents, valid client hints and JavaScript execution, indistinguishable from a real Chrome visitor by any traditional check.
Counting visitors was no longer enough. You needed to know
who was really on your board, and be able to do something about it.
That's what this add-on has become.
Where it stands today
It sees everything. The Live Traffic Radar shows every access in real time — IP, country, hosting provider, device, target URL, hit volume and a heuristic trust score. The redesigned dashboard turns that into readable intelligence: KPI cards with trend indicators, a 30-day datacenter activity chart, country rankings, and a global threat map showing interceptions as they happen.
It unmasks the disguises. Bots faking Googlebot are exposed through full Forward-Confirmed reverse DNS. Browsers claiming to be Chrome without valid client hints have their trust score destroyed. And the newest layer — Datacenter (ASN) Detection — catches what everything else misses: scrapers that pass every behavioural check but run on cloud infrastructure. Across 110 known hosting and VPN networks, from AWS and Azure down to the bulletproof hosts scrapers hide behind, it identifies not just
that a visitor is suspicious, but exactly which provider they're operating from.
The identity column makes patterns jump out. When you see a dozen different IPs from four countries all claiming to be the same browser build, you're not looking at visitors — you're looking at one distributed scraping botnet, and now you can see it at a glance.
It fights back. AI Shield stops LLM scrapers from training on your community's content. Junk Shield blocks aggressive commercial crawlers and vulnerability scanners. Datacenter Shield drops headless traffic at the door. Emergency Mode is there for the bad nights. All of it before the page is even built, which means the CPU and bandwidth stay yours.
And it respects your visitors. Every asset is served from your own server — no external CDN calls at all. IP retention is yours to choose, from one day to ninety. Addresses can be blurred on screen so screenshots never expose them.
Free vs Pro — and why Pro matters
The free version is genuinely useful, and it will stay that way. You get the statistics, the demographics, the trends, and — importantly — datacenter detection's trust scoring, so you can
see what's hitting your board.
But seeing and stopping are different things. The Pro licence is what turns visibility into defence: the active shields, the Live Radar with one-click IP banning, the full datacenter intelligence panel with provider identification and reputation lookups, and the complete threat analytics.
I'll be honest, because I'd rather earn your trust than oversell: no tool blocks everything. Anyone claiming otherwise is selling you something. Determined attackers on residential proxies will always be hard — that's why I recommend running this alongside a good edge layer like Cloudflare. But for the traffic that actually reaches your server, Pro gives you the complete arsenal rather than just the binoculars.
And there's a practical side:
every Pro licence directly funds the development you've been seeing. This add-on is maintained by one person. The datacenter engine, the Cloudflare handling, the redesigned dashboard, the privacy controls — all of it came out of evenings and weekends, funded by the people who chose to support it. If the add-on has saved your board bandwidth or spared you a scraping headache, upgrading is the most direct way to keep it moving forward.
What's next — and what would you like to see?
Development is very much ongoing. On the list: a dedicated permissions group so the add-on's settings are easier to find, automatic updating of the datacenter ranges, one-click whitelisting straight from the radar, and more.
But here's the thing —
the best features in this add-on came from users, not from me. Datacenter detection exists because someone described a scraping problem I couldn't solve with the tools available. The Cloudflare support exists because a user pointed out their IPs were all showing as the proxy. Several fixes came from people who took the time to write a detailed bug report instead of just uninstalling.
So please: tell me what you need. What's hitting your board that you can't stop? What number do you wish the dashboard showed? What's clunky? Post in this thread — I read everything, and it genuinely shapes what gets built next.
Thanks for using it, thanks for the feedback, and thanks to everyone who has supported the project with a licence.
Datacenter panel — completely redesigned
Redesigned Statistics Overview
Intrusion Attempts — the new forensic panel
Trend indicators corrected
Intrusion intelligence in the daily report