I noticed that certain topics were viewed quite a lot in only 1 or 2 days, I've never seen this before. Some examples of the topics: https://www.wilderssecurity.com/threads/extract-audio-from-youtube-video.387518/ https://www.wilderssecurity.com/threads/what-is-the-best-video-downloader.387516/
It's hard to determine what's going on exactly. There's no single IP address crawling the site. Nothing that obvious. But, there are a lot of extra bots, across a great many IP address ranges, here all day long lately. Nothing stands out individually though.
I don't think it excludes bots. However, as I dig into these, they appear to all be from Amazon AWS IP addresses. Lot of them. And, none of them are using bot like user agents. They all are passing for normal visitors, mostly using Firefox user agents.
OK, so it's not real people that is generating these excessive page view counts, that's what I thought. I must say these bots are a bit annoying, because there is now no way to know if a topic is really that popular. Not a big deal, but still.