Weird spike in number of views

[SimonDoom]

This is weird. One of my stories, published over a year ago and typically getting about 60 views per day, has received over 14,000 views in the last 3 days. It's the last chapter of an 8-chapter series. None of the other chapters have seen similar increases. All of them are around normal levels.

I can't figure out what would do this. The story is not on any toplists, and I haven't published anything in over 5 months. Seems very weird.

Another wrinkle on this is that the dramatic increase in views did not result in an increase in votes, which suggests to me this is something wholly automated and has nothing to do with additional real people viewing my story. So as far as I can tell the view count for this story has been artificially increased by over 14,000.

What would do this?

 

[RejectReality]

Probably some poorly-programmed bot, although it's possible that last chapter got linked from some well-trafficked forum/social media page/etc., causing every spider under the sun to crawl the link.

I've seen the latter happen, though the former is still the most likely possibility.

ETA: In the interest of clarity, I don't mean a bot attempting to increase the views of that submission. I mean a badly programmed bot that was meant to do something else and got caught in a loop accessing the submission, rather than fulfilling its intended purpose.

 

[gordo12]

I would think the site would have software capable of defeating hot linking. But I have seen bots get stuck (even google) and parse something thousands of times before someone fixes it.

If the story would stand alone (or close) then someone may be hot linking it for traffic bait.

 

[SimonDoom]

I would think the site would have software capable of defeating hot linking. But I have seen bots get stuck (even google) and parse something thousands of times before someone fixes it.

If the story would stand alone (or close) then someone may be hot linking it for traffic bait.

I don't have enough technical knowledge to know how this works. I suspect there was some sort of strange glitch, because it happened sometime in the last three days and it doesn't seem to be happening anymore. What seems especially weird is that it's only happening for the 8th and final chapter of a series.

 

[ElectricBlue]

I don't have enough technical knowledge to know how this works. I suspect there was some sort of strange glitch, because it happened sometime in the last three days and it doesn't seem to be happening anymore. What seems especially weird is that it's only happening for the 8th and final chapter of a series.

This happened to someone else a couple of months ago, but there was no report back on the cause nor the cure. I did comment elsewhere that Views does not equal Reads .

 

[SimonDoom]

This happened to someone else a couple of months ago, but there was no report back on the cause nor the cure. I did comment elsewhere that Views does not equal Reads .

And I responded. But you are quite right in this case, because it appears from the lack of change in votes that I received that the 14,000+ views didn't correspond to any reads at all. Which is pretty weird. I think it's something completely automated. No humans involved.

 

[ElectricBlue]

And I responded. But you are quite right in this case, because it appears from the lack of change in votes that I received that the 14,000+ views didn't correspond to any reads at all. Which is pretty weird. I think it's something completely automated. No humans involved.

Your tentacle monsters - those little buggers can press a lot of keys, real fast. There, we've solved it .

 

[SimonDoom]

Your tentacle monsters - those little buggers can press a lot of keys, real fast. There, we've solved it .

Your helpfulness knows no bounds. Truly.

 

[gordo12]

Your tentacle monsters - those little buggers can press a lot of keys, real fast. There, we've solved it .

Your helpfulness knows no bounds. Truly.

Let's not forget imagination either

Most hosting companies provide Cpanel which has a module in it to block hotlinking. However image files are the usual targets.

I have plugins that stop bots from multiple access attempts after so many hits/min. It wouldn't allow 14,000 of them, it would shut them down.

I'm not sure what they're doing here but that's pretty suspicious behaviour. Scrapers will hit a site for thousands of pages that they try to pass off as their own content. Maybe do a search for a unique phrase in the story and see if anything pops.

 

[Emirus]

I’ve begun reading many a story, thinking from the blurb it sounded good, and halfway down the first page took a walk.

 

[NotWise]

I’ve begun reading many a story, thinking from the blurb it sounded good, and halfway down the first page took a walk.

That describes almost everything I "view."

 

[Zeb_Carter]

As we all should know, the view number is does not mean someone read the story, it just means that someone, human or bot, clicked the link. Clicked.

When I'm perusing Lit on my phone via the Lit App, I have found that sometimes a story opens when all I waned to do is scroll. So, there's one more view added to the count and I didn't even read the title, just hit the back button.

 

[SimonDoom]

As we all should know, the view number is does not mean someone read the story, it just means that someone, human or bot, clicked the link. Clicked.

When I'm perusing Lit on my phone via the Lit App, I have found that sometimes a story opens when all I waned to do is scroll. So, there's one more view added to the count and I didn't even read the title, just hit the back button.

This is true. But I've found that view:vote ratios are relatively stable, and what that means is that while the "view" number doesn't tell you much about how many people actually read the story, it DOES give you a basis for comparing your story with other stories. You can be reasonably confident that if Story A received 100,000 views and Story B received 10,000 views, Story A probably received somewhere between 20 and 5 times as many reads as Story B. That's especially true if they are in the same category and have similar elements.

 

[ElectricBlue]

You can be reasonably confident that if Story A received 100,000 views and Story B received 10,000 views, Story A probably received somewhere between 20 and 5 times as many reads as Story B. That's especially true if they are in the same category and have similar elements.

That is true, but you are still mostly clueless as to how many people actually read either A or B all the way through, unless it's an episodic story cycle where you can see the end game numbers more clearly.

 

[SimonDoom]

That is true, but you are still mostly clueless as to how many people actually read either A or B all the way through, unless it's an episodic story cycle where you can see the end game numbers more clearly.

It seems logical that in the case of multi-chaptered series the number of views for the last chapter will closely approximate the number of reads. Why would someone click on chapter 10 unless they've read the first 9 chapters and they're motivated to read the last?

But the numbers don't support this hypothesis. I say that because view:vote ratios don't change as much as you'd think. I have two chaptered series, one with three chapters and one with eight.

For the first story, chapter 1 has a 119:1 ratio and chapter 3 has a 100:1 ratio. A little change, but not that much.

For the second story, chapter 1 has a 99:1 ratio and chapter 8 has a 70:1 ratio. A significant drop off, but not as much as you would think. This indicates to me that even in the case of late chapters, Lit readers for whatever reason click on the stories but don't read them. After all, we would expect that if a much higher percentage of late chapter viewers actually read the story they'd also be voting on the story. I'll note that in the case of both my stories the last chapter had a score much higher than that of the first chapter.

I think complete reads are, generally, somewhere between 25% and 5% of views. It makes a difference how long the story is.

Those stats are thrown off when bots get involved. The current number 1 story on the 12-month toplist -- M -- received thousands of phony votes shortly after it came out in May last year. I know because I was monitoring a story I'd just published at that time and I monitored this one too. One day it would receive tens of thousands of votes, the next day a few hundred. It's like what happened to my story, but on a much larger scale. In the case of M the ratio of views to reads must be enormous.

 

[gordo12]

One day it would receive tens of thousands of votes, the next day a few hundred. It's like what happened to my story, but on a much larger scale. In the case of M the ratio of views to reads must be enormous.

So how could you tell how many votes another author's story is getting? The views are public but I thought the votes were only accessible through the author page.

 

[SimonDoom]

So how could you tell how many votes another author's story is getting? The views are public but I thought the votes were only accessible through the author page.

I stand corrected. I meant views, not votes.

You can see another author's votes on toplists. The vote total is stated in parentheses on the toplist for most highly rated stories, and most highly rated stories in certain categories.

Several other authors have corroborated my observation that the view to vote ratio is in the neighborhood of 100:1. For me the average is 88:1, but it ranges from 52:1 to 181:1 over 23 stories, some standalone and some part of a series.

 

[NotWise]

You can see another author's votes on toplists. The vote total is stated in parentheses on the toplist for most highly rated stories, and most highly rated stories in certain categories.

The 30-day top list will hold much of what's published in the last month, and in categories with less than about 8 stories/day (250/month) it will contain everything published.

Similarly for the 12-month list. If a category gets less than about two posts every three days then the list will hold everything, and for many categories it will hold a lot of what is published in a year.

 

[gordo12]

So this is what you're talking about? top list 30 days?

https://www.literotica.com/c/loving-wives/top/last-30-days

I'm at #6 & 7 & 18 of approx 180 stories. I don't see any vote scores ? I do see an averaged vote but not the number of votes. Are we talking about the same thing

 

[ElectricBlue]

I think complete reads are, generally, somewhere between 25% and 5% of views. It makes a difference how long the story is.

I'm with you on the 20 - 25%. That's what I go by. 5% is too depressingly low to think about.

And yes, that weird way the vote/view ratio seems to set itself with the first chapter and then continues (slowly tightening) through to the last. That's counter-intuitive to me - you'd think if one-in-a-hundred vote on the first chapter, but only 50% read the second and only 25% read the third (which seems to be roughly what happens), then the ratio of votes/views would double and double again IF the story fans keep reading. But it doesn't happen that way - the ratio stays pretty much the same. How does that one in a hundred person know they need to vote? that's what I want to know.

It's like the road toll - how do roughly the same number of people each year know they need to drive into a tree? Human behaviour, en-masse, is bizarrely predictable.

 

[SimonDoom]

The 30-day top list will hold much of what's published in the last month, and in categories with less than about 8 stories/day (250/month) it will contain everything published.

Similarly for the 12-month list. If a category gets less than about two posts every three days then the list will hold everything, and for many categories it will hold a lot of what is published in a year.

Good point. For categories with relatively few published stories, like Illustrated, the lists contain everything. In fact, only 12 illustrated stories have been published in the last month. On the other hand, 10 to 20 incest stories are published per day, so the top list doesn't reflect all the stories published in that category. Regardless, the quantity is sufficient to provide useful information about view:vote ratios generally.

 

[JamesMiehoff]

It was probably one of the vacuum bots getting locked on your story.

Find a relatively unique phrase or even the title and google it. There was another thread about that.

I did it and was shocked to find one of my stories on almost 80 sites. It was a story only published here.

Just be careful if you try some of the links. On several of them, Norton popped up and told me that it stopped some malicious links from downloading to my computer.

There was one somewhere with a **** domain that was an exact copy of Literotica, right down to linking you back here if you clicked on anything.

james

 

[SimonDoom]

It was probably one of the vacuum bots getting locked on your story.

Find a relatively unique phrase or even the title and google it. There was another thread about that.

I did it and was shocked to find one of my stories on almost 80 sites. It was a story only published here.

Just be careful if you try some of the links. On several of them, Norton popped up and told me that it stopped some malicious links from downloading to my computer.

There was one somewhere with a **** domain that was an exact copy of Literotica, right down to linking you back here if you clicked on anything.

james

Thanks. I tried some searching but didn't find anything, other than links to the submissions here at Literotica.

 

[JamesMiehoff]

Thanks. I tried some searching but didn't find anything, other than links to the submissions here at Literotica.

Hmmm. Now I don't know how to take that. Could I have just been lucky on the choice of phrase I used?

On the other hand, should I pat myself on the back for being copied so prevalently or should I be pissed off that all these sites are ripping my stories?

I have to admit that all of those feelings and more have gone through my pea brain since I first found out about the unauthorized distributions.

james