Spam bots?

[cdub]

This is strange - on my forum http://www.studentfilms.com/ I'm seeing a huge jump in the guest count.. It's was up to 140 guests.... which is great - I think - because when I check my Google Analytics realtime it says that only 12 people are on the site and I'm not seeing a jump in the last 15 minutes of Google Analytics visits.

Any idea what's going on here? If it's actual traffic that would be great - but it's not being reflected in Google Analytics - which is odd - which makes me think it's something else.

And now it's back to the more normal 30 guests - strangeness.

 

[tenants]

Which country did they originate from, what is the referer of the jump in traffic (organic / direct / links)

You can check these sort of things in AWSTATS
http://xenforo.com/community/thread...s-bandwidth-per-day-normal.46591/#post-501534

Once you know the referer, you can generally tell where the jump in traffic came from

You also might have just been crawled... search engines/other spiders
Just getting a tweet can often send back 20-40 spiders on your site

 

[cdub]

That's the thing though - it's showing up on the guest list on the main page of the site by not in real time google analytics (yet at least)

 

[tenants]

You can check the IP of the users

This will should tell you if they are spiders (just google the IP)
and many spam bots IP addresses will show up on databases (if they are spam bots, but I suspect a crawl from a spider at this point)

Just click the IP link for the guest on your forum http://www.studentfilms.com/online/

[The IP link will be in the top right of each users row, and only visible for users with this permission]