I think the thread view count is off by a factor of ten. Is this some sort of DoS attack as well?

I would guess that is a function of the AI bots. I have read that many sites have had a huge jump in visits after the bots find them. Sometimes driving costs up substantially while the site gets no benefit from these bots. But that is just a guess on my part.

I noticed that too. One reason I post a photo with most ARR 557 posts is so I have a quick way of seeing the number of views. It's gone sky high for the last couple of posts.

Likewise, "The Train That Wouldn't Die" has been deluged with hits for at least a year and a half --- if only that reflected actual interest from human beings, what a wonderful world it would be.

If you allow AI bots to access a website, they get education without paying for it. So you let them take a better position than a human.
Better lock them out: https://www.google.com/search?q=robots. ... ck+AI+bots

AI Bots and all kind of search engines. The forums I run list which pages are being accessed and by whom. There are search engine spiders gathering info 24/7.

This is good, since it generates links to your content. This is bad, since at least some of them are clearly AI bots.

The search engine web crawlers are good. They're looking for changes to catalog which happens a lot with forums. I see Googlebot and others here often. The ethical AI data scrapers can be easily blocked with a robots.txt file. However, that file is not an absolute command for bots, merely a suggestion. The unethical bot runners will ignore the file and do what they do whether you like it or not.

In a nutshell, bots are likely a significant part of views.

Which is why I never block them using the robots.txt, the ethical ones are the ones I want to access it and as you say, the bad ones ignore it.

However, I got rid of some of the worst offenders by blocking groups of IP addresses they use.

The board is loading slowly today, is it the bots again, or a DOS attack? How hard would it be to add reCAPTCHA to the board?

I tried to add some photos to a post, it said "The image file you tried to attach is invalid." I checked by adding a photo I had posted previously to the same post, and it said the same thing. So I'm guessing a bug has showed up.

One of the UK Railfan sites (WNXX) has had to introuduce "human verification" measures in the last few days due to it being targeted by large numbers of AI bots which was making the site unusable.
I wasn't able to get on here at all yesterday........

The Majestic-12 bot is here a lot. I understand that it can be a resource hog in some instances. However, the board has been running slow and then became impossible to post due to an out of disk space error for the database being returned when I tried to post yesterday. So far, it seems that problem has been fixed.

On most of the Forums I frequent - the 'views' tend to be about 1000 times the posts on the thread.

I'm guessing this is because the forum software was written in a different age when "page request == view".

More modern analytics tools do a much better job of filtering out bot traffic, but I'm betting the core "view count" mechanics came from the early days of the phBB software back 25 years ago.