"Views" Run Amok

Possibly...including bots.

Thanks for the response.
The sleepy little thread that this happened on is "Where Is The US Economy Headed." I posted when the number of Views was listed as about 475,000.
Georgeob and Reasoning Logic each replied a couple of times. All very civil, of course.
I notice that the number of Views has increased by more than 1,000 in about 5 hours.
So how/why would a Bot choose that thread? Should I be alarmed?

bots are good for 30 per reply, and a popular thread will get about 100 views per reply which is 70 real people. i think the problem here is that you think there were 4 replies in that 5 hours but their were actually more. besides, it is an important subject that people care about.

Search engines use automated indexing programs--called spiders, crawlers, and several other names--to keep their information up to date. I doubt that bots have anything to do with it, although some bot programs respond to information picked up by spiders. Those are looking for key words, and economy might well be a much sought after key word.

As well, people here may have a high enough regard for the quality of your posts that they will look in because they have seen you to be the last person posting in a thread. Finally, many people who come here rely on the "most recent posts" rubric, and just scroll through that looking at recent posts in all the threads. I think you are making very much of what really is very little.

Interesting. I am largely computer illiterate.
I would expect that there might be a very high ratio of views:replies in some threads - Really Bad Jokes, for example - 60:1.
The ratios for Letty's and Rockhead's music threads each come in at around 20:1.
The Economy did surprise me with the size of the spike as well as the ratio - also 20:1.
Lola's Coffee thing - an acquired taste, perhaps - is 10:1.

I doubt if Lola's coffee house is producing very many key words.

By the way, a lot of people post to Lola's thread, and do so frequently.