Inflated Post Counts

[HackAl]

Hi Everyone.

Lately we've noticed our post counts on every topic increase at the steady rate of about 9 per hour, day or night.  This happens until the topic reaches the 6th post position at which time the count drops off dramatically.  I wonder if this has something to do with RSS which sometimes defaults to the 5 most recent topics.

I've installed httpBL and "Spiders Don't Increase Topic Views" but the issue persists. 

In my stats, I'm seeing: "Unknown robot (identified by 'bot' followed by a space or one of the following characters _+:,.;/\-)" though I'm not sure that's related.

I'd like to try to have my site (www.hackensacknow.com) actually reflect the number of real people viewing topics.  Thanks for any help, advice. Using 2.0.9.

Thank you.

 

[Chas Large]

Do you allow Guests to post on your forum? If yes, then anyone can add to the post count. If not then only your members are posting and you can see who's making them.

Or are you talking about "Views"?

[HackAl]

I'm talking about view.  Apologies.  Thanks.

[Chas Large]

If the site is public then anyone visiting a topic can push up the view count, including spiders and bots. And yes, if you have RSS enabled then this too can cause it.

Short of adding the bots IP to a BAN I can't think of any way to make the views only reflect real views. Sorry.

[Steve]

http://custom.simplemachines.org/mods/index.php?mod=882

[Chas Large]

http://custom.simplemachines.org/mods/index.php?mod=882

Good call but the OP says he already installed that 

[Steve]

Oops. Sorry Chas. Don't know how I missed that.