I’ve notice much more traffic as well. While I am not even in the same universe as the hits you’re getting, I’m still noticing larger amounts of traffic. I am updating my site more often now, so maybe getting visitors from the global activity page? Weird...
I had a 34K visit and half-million hit count period sometime last fall. Came out of the blue and faded away. Wasn't a one-day thing though. It sort of rose and fell over a week.
i did a bunch of testing months ago and it seems neocities gets a huge amount of false/bot activity unfortunately. i think neocities' own thumbnail bot might even count towards the total, every single time you make any update.
I remember that rose. How many times do you think the bot pings the site per update? I did do some live coding on some of those days, but never hit views like that when I coded directly on neocities before. Time to write some new analytics software...
im pretty sure its just 1/update. i dont have php analytics running on my new site update, but when i did have them running, most of the views were just bot things trying to find like /wp-login or /admin or whatever, 24/7, trying every possible login page that could exist. and i had known bots filtered out!
Good catch! While browsing the more obscure corners of Neocities, I do remember being redirected a few times to vaguely similar malicious/suspicious looking pages. Back then I was not paying much attention to it. I even thought that some of these links/redirects were intentionally left there by unscrupulous Neocities sites! Now that I know what might be happening, I'll be on the lookout and more lenient... :)