Most users ever online was 509 on Aug 25 2008, 12:34 PM

Anyone have a possible reason for that spike?

Hadn't noticed the new spike I'm guessing one of those inexplicable 'swarming'/'eventing' things by people with mobile devices - anyway, like the previous occasion, it doesn't seem to have affected things 'here'. Other board admins have noticed similar 'events' in the past, no clear/sinister explanation found last time I looked. Search 'bot going berserk was another suggestion.

Do you have httpd_access logs to look at? As Farelf says, might be a search-engine spider gone nuts, or even something like a referral spammer.

-- rick

That would be the 130+ Meg file I've been searching through for signs of an exploit that caused the release of a security patch for versions 2.2x and 2.3.x, trying to sort out whether this 2.1.x version might be attackable or not.

As far as activity on that day, the only oddity I've come across is a visit by a bot from http://www.attributor.com/ which seems to be somewhat akin to what cyveillance was up to. What I find odd is that this search enging only hit that one day (25 Aug) ... has yet to return. The real spin on that bot's visit was the massive bloat to the error.log file while looking for lofi pages that didn't exist ... which caused some more searching trying to sort out just where those links might have been coming from/located. Basically gave up on researchin gthat stuff, going back to trying to find the exploit evidence. Interrupted by being needed elswhere for quite a while.

Yes, grep is your friend.

-- rick

In this case, grep and a lot of pipes <g>

So, anyway, the 509 for Aug 25 2008 was scrubbed/lost/died because nobody believed in it anymore? (choose one)

Successive replacements:

79 Sep 23 2008
116 Oct 20 2008
162 Nov 08 2008
224 Nov 12 2008

Database cleanup, that (and other numbers) recalculated during rebuilds of various statistics.

Thanks Wazoo scrubbed/lost/died because nobody believed in it anymore (who believes statistics anyway? the 'true' number is a recipriversexclusion, trust me, I know this stuff).