A mystery I have never solved

1. 84

   Pcunixposted 14 years ago

   I have asked about this at other forums and never heard a theory I liked, so let's run it by y'all.
   
   I have a page that is a book review of a book about the (now ancient) Pentium Pro Processor.
   
   I wrote that review in March of 1999.
   
   Sometime in 2006, while doing some web log analysis, I noticed that this page was getting an unusual number of hits.
   
   Consider that even when I wrote the review, a Pentium Pro was yesterdays news.  By 2006, nobody should have had much interest in a book about Pentium Pro.  And yet, it was getting hundreds, sometimes thousands of hits every single day.
   
   First mystery:  hardly ever was there any referral data or search query attached.  The views came from all over the world, straight out of the ether.
   
   Almost never did a visitor visit another page.  The bounce rate was nearly 100%.
   
   They clicked on no ads and saw no ads.  Adsense channel data showed no clicks and almost no impressions, so none of these visits had Javascript or, if they did, they exited too quickly for the script to run.
   
   No GETS of the images on the page happen either.  I keep thinking this must somehow be significant.
   
   Oh, one more thing:  the browswr string is always the same: "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)"
   
   This continued for years.   After Analytics became available,  I had even more evidence that Javascript does not run; the visits do not record in Analytics.
   
   The visits continue to this day.   IP addresses from everywhere, never loading Javascript,  never GETting images, never carrying a referrer.   The page has great SERP for related keywords, but as you'd expect, searching for a processor first manufactured in 1995 is a pretty rare event!
   
   Theories that have been advanced:   
   
   Somebody left a script running in a loop.   From all those IP addresses for all these years??
   
   It's spiders.   Nope, does not seem to be.  Oh, of course some are, but not this many. Even if it were spiders, other articles from the same time period don't see anything like this traffic.  Why would they?  And spiders usually grab other pages - these never do.
   
   Anybody here have a theory they'd like to throw out?

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2. 84

   Pcunixposted 14 years ago

   And also I forgot this
   
   http://www.webmasterworld.com/analytics/3518069.htm
   
   Slightly different, but the same Browser info.

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3. 60

   readytoescapeposted 14 years ago

   Theory 1: School kids, possibly 3rd world, using incredibly out of date ware, most of which is donated from corporations that finally decided to upgrade and they are trying to get the machines working.
   
   Theory 2: Extra terrestrial life or Nigerians working a scam
   
   Go with number one>

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   1. 84

      Pcunixposted 14 years agoin reply to this

      Number one is good, but why no referrer data? 
      
      It could explain the browser and the Javascript.  Though why no image GET?

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4. 77

   skyfireposted 14 years ago

   Theory 1 : Mobile Browsers. Why ? There are many regional mobile browsers which are are not at all tracked by analytics. And adsense/JS/Flash ads are not visible on those sites as well. What you see in some of the old mobile browsers is nothing but text-based content.
   
   Theory 2 : Text browsers (I doubt if more than 10 newbie/intermediate people are using this in 2010).

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   1. 84

      Pcunixposted 14 years agoin reply to this

      Would they have that browser string?

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