April 20, 2004

10:50 AM

What would cause AOL 4.0 to all of a sudden be the second largest percentage of visitors to visit a website? Last month IE and Netscape were neck and neck.
posted by grefo to (5 comments total)

Can you give us any more detail? What kind of numbers are we talking about? What's the website about? What's the specific browser ID string in the server log?
posted by DrJohnEvans at 10:58 AM on April 20, 2004

Not really. I'm just asking for a guy I work with, who's not real sure of what he is looking for or at. And I don't have access. Sorry.

I think it's a bot, but as the guy who might have to rework the site to work in AOL 4.0...
posted by grefo at 11:15 AM on April 20, 2004

I would question stats that are showing IE and Netscape as neck and neck, never mind AOL 4. Unless this is a very unusual/specialized site. And even then.
posted by sageleaf at 11:24 AM on April 20, 2004

If he has access to the raw logs, a look at the hits for AOL 4.0 should provide some leads. Some possible explanations: US-spoofed 'bot run amuck, someone copying the entire site all at once or doing regular site scraping, his URL got posted in some high profile section of AOL, a misconfigured script or meta refresh is feeding extra hits to AOL 4.0, the hit reporting config got messed up, etc. Digging through the logs will give him some good clues as to what's going on.

"Not real sure of what he looking for or at" is another hint, though. That sounds like it's also possible he's misinterpreted the info in front of him. If you're going to have to do extra work as a result, seems like it would be perfectly reasonable for you to ask to see the report so you both can agree on what it means and how best to respond. For instance, with a dramatic and unlikely change like that I'd want to watch for a bit first to evaluate whether there's an actual trend that needs to be dealt with or just a one-time aberration that can safely be ignored.
posted by nakedcodemonkey at 12:06 PM on April 20, 2004

Also, just from looking at my own server logs, I think AOL's connections work in a funny way: specifically, a funny way with multiple IP addresses. It seems that AOL doesn't assign constant IP addresses to its users, even for a single dial-up session, for instance. Whenever I have an AOL user visit any of my sites, the logs show a number of slightly different IP addresses, each making a single request for a file. For instance:

216.268.57.72 [2004/04/20 17:39:11] GET /index.html
216.268.57.75 [2004/04/20 17:39:11] GET /styles/acssfile.css
216.268.57.70 [2004/04/20 17:39:12] GET /img01.jpg
216.268.57.78 [2004/04/20 17:39:12] GET /img02.jpg

So each request comes from a different IP, even though it's the same client. This would inflate the apparent number of visits by AOL clients.
posted by DrJohnEvans at 2:40 PM on April 20, 2004