Apparent Forum Traffic Drop After v4.7.14 to v4.7.15 Upgrade

[sadams101]

Yesterday I updated to v4.7.15, and since then I've seen what appears to be a ~50% traffic drop in my forum app. At the moment it is hard for me to tell if this drop is real, or perhaps due to a change to the Online Users by App that I don't see listed in the change notes.

In summary, until I upgraded yesterday my Online Users by App shows my forum visitors dropping a huge amount, to where they are now below the level of my site's Pages app. To me this seems like an impossible drop, given that 90%+ of my site's total content is within our forums. 

I am wondering if anyone else who upgraded has seen a similar drop in forum traffic, whether this drop is real, and what in the update might have caused such a drop? 

[Jim M]

Would recommend checking your third party analytics tools (like Google Analytics) and server logs to compare in what you're seeing. There isn't necessarily anything changed in online user stats or stats in general though.

[sadams101]

Things have gotten back to normal after 3-4 days of this strange traffic anomaly.

I'm not sure if this issue was related to the upgrade or not, but it did begin right after the upgrade. The traffic drop was for my forum only, which normally has 7-10 times the traffic of my Pages app--for those days it was basically even 50/50 traffic between my forum and Pages apps.

 

[Marc Stridgen]

Realistically, I would think its probably timing. After all, the software is still the same today.

[sadams101]

Since my original post I've been monitoring things closely, and there have been several waves where my forum traffic seem to vary dramatically, at least when looking at the number of people online in the last 30 minutes, and comparing that with the Online Users By App (making a 2nd request here that you remove "System" from this--it's not an app, and it is just confusing and makes it so that I cannot really see a correct breakdown of actual users per app).

Starting yesterday, things are back to normal traffic-wise, which means ~10x the traffic is on my forum compared with my Pages app. Since nobody else has had the same experience, I will assume that it must have been coincidence, perhaps a Google update or something?

[Jim M]

1 hour ago, sadams101 said:

(making a 2nd request here that you remove "System" from this--it's not an app, and it is just confusing and makes it so that I cannot really see a correct breakdown of actual users per app).

System is anything like login, registration, policy pages, etc... It is indeed an app 😉 . You're more than welcome to make a suggestion though in our Feedback forum.

1 hour ago, sadams101 said:

Starting yesterday, things are back to normal traffic-wise, which means ~10x the traffic is on my forum compared with my Pages app. Since nobody else has had the same experience, I will assume that it must have been coincidence, perhaps a Google update or something?

If you have any server caching, CDN, etc... for guests could just be people are on the same page and those items thus not hitting the software. Don't know. Doesn't seem to be something hit by other users so would be very specific.

[sadams101]

As for system, it is very doubtful that what you just described could be getting so much traffic, unless there is a ton of bot traffic trying to create accounts--but if this is the case, it would be an even better reason not to see this in that chart.

For example, here is what my chart looks like now--so 40% of my site traffic is login, registration or policy pages? There are ~10 members logged in right now, and Google Analytics is showing 278 users in the last 30 minutes, so how does this make sense? This System "App" constantly shows a very high percentage on my site, and as you can see, it makes it hard to see the actual traffic to what I consider to be apps (and System isn't one of them--never has been).

[Jim M]

13 minutes ago, sadams101 said:

As for system, it is very doubtful that what you just described could be getting so much traffic, unless there is a ton of bot traffic trying to create accounts--but if this is the case, it would be an even better reason not to see this in that chart.

What I told you is indeed what handles System. As mentioned, you're welcome to post in Feedback and others can comment as well. It may be your opinion this is worthless data but to others it may not be. Which is why we have the Feedback forum.