Scrambled Membership Stats

[Large Scale Planes]

I've been noticing seemingly random jumps in our 'Most Online' stat on the forums, and I've been a bit suspicious of the figures it has been showing. Today I noticed it had leapt dramatically to a totally ridiculous figure - prior to the jumps starting to happen, the highest figure I trusted was 370. I've just tried rebuilding the caches using the 'something is wrong' feature under Support in the ACP, but this didn't make a difference. At this rate, Most Online will exceed our total member count soon! (Yes, I know this is possible if enough guests visit at once, but clearly, something is wrong here.)

Any ideas?

Kev

[Adriano Faria]

Did you have a DDoS attack lately? That could explain the huge increase.

You can edit that block to enter the number you think is real.

[Bluto]

One of my sites hit 90K and it was because someone wanted their thread to have XXXX number of views.  I guess they paid for some bot to hit that thread and make it really popular.

Probably what @Adriano Faria said above.

[Large Scale Planes]

13 hours ago, Adriano Faria said:

Did you have a DDoS attack lately? That could explain the huge increase.

You can edit that block to enter the number you think is real.

If we did, then it wasn't very successful! I don't recall (and no one reported) any downtime that could be attributable to such an attack. But you're probably right - other than a glitch in the forum software, this is the only reasonable explanation.

Kev