Digital Comic Museum
General Category => Comic Related Discussion => Topic started by: bminor on August 26, 2013, 07:21:07 AM
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I was just looking at the stats on the most downloaded books here at DCM.
#1 - Wanted Comics 11 -JVJ - 29940 downloads
#2 - Women in Red Archive - 4747 downloads
Wanted #11 was only uploaded back on April 24th, 2013 and has six times the downloads of #2, that has been on the site since April 16, 2013!
It seems kind of odd to me. Is there some sort of glitch in the recording of downloads or some other problem?
I am just curious, and like Dandra says in the comments field of Wanted 11 says, "What is it about this issue that makes it so heavily downloaded?"
Yours,
bminor
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Someone with a download bot is hammering the site 1000s of times a day.
I've banned several like it over the years. The last one was from China. Russia is another popular source for bots.
It's something that has been bugging me for years. It throws our numbers all out of whack.
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Any idea what the most legitimate downloaded book would be?
b.
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No clue at all.
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And I thought our download bots had human faces and names...
Har har.
"Let go of the numbers, they don't mean a thing. "
(Zen bot)
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Just looking at the numbers quickly, everything except the first looks relatively natural, though any individual download might be suspect. The Woman in Red happens to be the name of movies starring both Gene Wilder and Barbara Stanwyck, and the character has been recycled by Alan Moore. I can see that being a source of traffic.
A clever person might search for links to each comic, to see if people were sent to download things, but that's a little to ambitious for me, just now. But it'd be an easy way to see why more people would download Whiz Comics #95 as opposed to, say, #2 or any other major issue in the series.
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Ok.
But in this case checking the Error log within the RWD software running the site we see this file was requested 1000s of time every few seconds and failing because the bot was not a member of the site and hadn't logged in to download.
I recall banning another both around the time I noticed Women in Red was thousands of 'downloads' more popular than reasonable.
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Too bad, because as Golden Age Comic's first 'masked' superheroine she is a genuinely interesting character from a historic perspective. A more accurate download count would be a better gauge of interest in women characters of the period.
Though non-superpowered, like the Phantom and Batman, the earliest female costumed crimefighters are The Woman in Red,[15] introduced in Standard Comics' Thrilling Comics #2 (March 1940); Lady Luck, debuting in the Sunday-newspaper comic-book insert The Spirit Section June 2, 1940; the comedic character Red Tornado, debuting in All-American Comics #20 (Nov 1940); Miss Fury,[16] debuting in the eponymous comic strip by female cartoonist Tarpé Mills on April 6, 1941; the Phantom Lady, introduced in Quality Comics Police Comics #1 (Aug. 1941); and the Black Cat,[17] introduced in Harvey Comics' Pocket Comics #1 (also Aug. 1941). The superpowered Nelvana of the Northern Lights debuted in Canadian publisher Hillborough Studio's Triumph-Adventure Comics #1 (Aug. 1941), and the superhumanly strong Miss Victory was introduced in Holyoke (comics) the same month. The character was later adopted by A.C. Comics.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superheroine#Female_superheroes