Bug Download Stats

[Buck Rogers]

I think there's a problem with the download stats:

Bell 206 Helicopter

Mar 20, 2025

Add-On for Orbiter2024

• Buck Rogers
• Spacecraft

1117 views and downloads (in less than 24hrs), flattering but unlikely

 

[misha.physics]

I can confirm, I noticed strange behavior with statistics for my last add-on as well.

 

[LadyCroussette]

I wonder if it may actually have 15 downloads and O-F just pooped out the 78 out of thin air lol (since its at 1578 right now). Let's see:

SELECT 'addonName', 'author', 'addonDownloads' FROM 'DownloadTable' WHERE 'addonDownloads'>100;

lol

 

[jacquesmomo]

I can confirm, I noticed strange behavior with statistics for my last add-on as well.

Me too... few days ago my ummu hadock was about 1000 (already strange) and now 7000...
I can't beleave that...

 

[Lucy]

I can tell you that the count is legitimate, in that this is the number of times the download link has been accessed; however, from the logs, a lot of this appears to be automated traffic.

 

[Urwumpe]

So the number is truthful, but not what the developers want. Can we get rid of some of the robots there?

 

[Lucy]

We previously had quite aggressive anti-bot preventative measures in place over the Resources section due to the choices of... certain specific individuals. Recently these were relaxed as there's inevitably quite a high number of false-positives when protection measures are cranked up too high.

 

[Buck Rogers]

Seems to have "calmed down" today...

 

[nbcfrosty]

You can block these using robots.txt

Disallow: /resources/*/download

 

[Lucy]

You can block these using robots.txt

Disallow: /resources/*/download

We can, but:

1. This is a request, not an enforcement; bots can and do simply ignore this and crawl the paths there anyway, and;
2. We want indexers such as bingbot and google's spiders to crawl the resources section for their search indexes, but these are the only kind of bot that actually pay any attention to robots.txt and would thus ignore the resource section with this rule set.

 

[nbcfrosty]

We can, but:

1. This is a request, not an enforcement; bots can and do simply ignore this and crawl the paths there anyway, and;
2. We want indexers such as bingbot and google's spiders to crawl the resources section for their search indexes, but these are the only kind of bot that actually pay any attention to robots.txt and would thus ignore the resource section with this rule set.

The rule I posted above only applies to the download link to prevent trigger of download, it will not prevent crawlers from indexing the resource section. Note the url path ends with download. It doesn’t apply to the addon specific pages nor the paginated list of addons.

It’s the recommended way to handle this problem as per xenforo forums.

 

[Buck Rogers]

Still don't get why both counts are identical! Even taking into account bots some "real" users must be just browsing, other addons have a ratio of 1/10 or higher, with the exception of this one and AFAIK only the MusicMFD?

 

[Lucy]

The rule I posted above only applies to the download link to prevent trigger of download, it will not prevent crawlers from indexing the resource section. Note the url path ends with download. It doesn’t apply to the addon specific pages nor the paginated list of addons.

It’s the recommended way to handle this problem as per xenforo forums.

Good point - I hadn't spotted the path rule only catching the download link.

I'll add the rule when I have a moment and we'll see if it makes a difference.