Slashdot Mirror


The XHamster Wikipedia Page Is Suddenly Immensely Popular, and No One Knows Why (theoutline.com)

An anonymous reader shares a report: At the beginning of June I started to notice that XHamster, the third most popular adult website after Pornhub and XVideos, had one of the most viewed Wikipedia pages. On May 29, XHamster's Wikipedia page went from receiving around 100,000 views to 200,000. By June 1, it was getting more than 300,000 views a day for no apparent reason. There haven't been any viral stories about XHamster lately. There are no controversies about the page itself that would have prompted sustained attention or an edit war. [...] Pageviews on XHamster's Wikipedia page, however, has been bonkers throughout the month of June for no obvious reason. That's according to a pageview analysis tool from Wikimedia Labs, and confirmed by a Wikipedia spokesperson. I reached out to Wikipedia to see if it could shed some light on this puzzle. In an email, a spokesperson verified that the pageviews were accurate but that they didn't know what was causing the surge. Wikipedia's spokesperson pointed out that the edit activity, unlike its pageviews, has remained steady.

4 of 129 comments (clear)

  1. Botnet? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    My first thoughts are a botnet using a wikipedia page to check for instructions (since wikipedia is unlikely to be blocked)....otherwise, random IP accesses to a page like that would be very weird.

  2. Re:Another surge on July 5 happened by Critical+Facilities · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Hey hey hey, now wait a minute.....

    Everyone knows in Soviet Russia, the commerce controls YOU.

  3. Malware/Dead drop by henry.cow · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Gut guess is the page being used to help infected clients find their C&C server, like this - http://www.businessinsider.com/russian-hackers-turla-communicate-malware-britney-spears-instagram-comment-2017-6

  4. Viral advertising by LetterRip · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Perhaps the person 'noticing' the phenomenon, is the originator of the phenomenon and trying to increase traffic to the said porn sites by calling attention to this 'mystery'.