Without more information it's hard to say, but I'm fairly confident your host is wrong and it is in fact bot traffic. What is the record number of users you've had online? It should say this in the statistics section of your forum on the index page. I'm assuming 600K sessions on the view forum page would make the max online users fairly high.
Also, if you check your online list during times where there is an activity spike on your forum are there any guests logged as viewing a forum? It seems as though there has been a lot of people recently report that bot traffic, particularly from AI scrapers has been rampant and it would make sense, especially if you only have 800 users on your forum but over half a million requests looking at forums.
You need to push back with your host, they're not correct. phpBB doesn't under normal circumstances have issues with inflated sessions looking at individual forums.
Also, if you check your online list during times where there is an activity spike on your forum are there any guests logged as viewing a forum? It seems as though there has been a lot of people recently report that bot traffic, particularly from AI scrapers has been rampant and it would make sense, especially if you only have 800 users on your forum but over half a million requests looking at forums.
You need to push back with your host, they're not correct. phpBB doesn't under normal circumstances have issues with inflated sessions looking at individual forums.
Statistics: Posted by danieltj — Mon Jun 16, 2025 11:36 am