Because of my curious nature, I watch and pay attention to things. I don't always understand them fully. But when the Club is slow to load, what I began to notice is how much traffic there is. Not just casually more, exponentially more. Like, the record was shattered several times in a row. Until finally the other day we hit almost 28,000 'guests' here. Not members, guests. There aren't even 28,000 Alembics yet. I'm sorry that seems weird to me. In almost 15 years hanging around here, I've seen days where there were 200-300 hits. So 28,000...? Last time I brought it up, I got snarked for it, so I decided not to mention it again. When you start looking at what the guests are looking at, it's totally random necrothreads. (we can do that, any of us can) Now why would some rando just come here and waste time browsing 20-year old threads about things that aren't about anything remotely current... or not even related to Alembic. Well, obviously as Moderator Dave confirmed, obnoxious little netbots have infiltrated. Remember, we talk about a lotta' personal life stuff here on top of shared interests in fine guitars. So the other day when I was feeling extra-patient, I scanned through a few of the 700-some odd pages of our guests to see what they were interested in.
Go ahead, help yourselves. If you want to see what the bots are reading for entertainment. Bottom left, click "Users Online".
I'll echo what others have said; I appreciate this Club and the people who work to keep it up for us.