Since December there has been extremely unusual traffic to the enwiki page Skathi (moon) as shown by its pageviews history. It mimics real pageviews but I would not expect anywhere near this volume of actual attention to this page.
Description
Description
| Status | Subtype | Assigned | Task | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Open | None | T280565 Improve pageview automated traffic detection heuristics | |||
| Open | None | T280844 Too many views to Skathi (moon) on enwiki |
Event Timeline
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It's discussed at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)#Very_weird_page_views (permanent link). Desktop and mobile views are both huge while app views are tiny.
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There's a good chance we're dealing with something similar to what happened in T273741, namely
Perhaps someone has an app now which tests its internet connection by pinging this article.
as suggested by User:GKFX.
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Wanted to flag Analytics - could this kind of thing be captured as automated traffic?
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@kzimmerman : I added the task as a subtask of T280565.
I did some further analysis:
- Constant distinct IPs and user-agents hourly over a day (~180 ips, ~450 user agents, less during low-hours of circadian pattern)
- Despite being categorized as 'desktop' and 'mobile-wep', all the views are from mobile-web, with android being good citizen and sending detailed user-agent info and iOS not so much, doing its requests through Pandas-VPN on desktop site with not detailed user-agent.
- I looked some IPs from the set, and they are from different cloud/dedicated servers providers.