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.

Comments

i visited xhamster once

[FudRucker]

and there were not any hamsters, but lots of poor people that could not afford to even buy clothes to wear

Re:i visited xhamster once

[EvilSS]

and there were not any hamsters, but lots of poor people that could not afford to even buy clothes to wear

Oh there were hamsters, you just didn't look in the right category!

Botnet?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Botnet?

[dlleigh]

Yup, sounds like a command and control network.

Are all the hits to the main page, or are there also a bunch to the history, talk and talk-history pages?

Re:Botnet?

[Anubis IV]

They mention that possibility in the article, but rule it mostly out on account of the fact that 95% of the traffic to the page is from mobile devices, which are fairly atypical for botnet attacks.

Re:Botnet?

[Anonymous Coward]

If it is on mobile I reckon it might be Chromes Awesomebar.

People enter: xhamster which results in a google search. With safe search on wikipedia is the top entry.

Re:Botnet?

[Opportunist]

This.

Actually, /. would make a great botnet C&C server. It's notorious for not deleting anything, no matter how inane, it's publicly accessible, not well known enough to be blocked by any national entity (or blacklisted in any corporate proxies)... /. would be the perfect C&C server. Just make your trojan read certain topics that invariably pop up where people post mostly bullshit and nobody really reads anything anyway (Trump comes to mind. Or global warming), encode what you want your trojan to do, sign it with your key to ensure that only you get to send out commands and you're set.

Oh, before I forget...

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Re:Botnet?

[tehcyder]

before every normie had a web browser in their pocket

Just a friendly word of advice, but using the word "normie" makes you sound like a stupid fucking twat.

Another surge on July 5 happened

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

It is called slashdot effect. It used to be huge, back in the day when people were the first to welcome the overlords and talking about how the government controls commerce in Soviet Union and people had check marked lists in fixed point font describing why the proposed spam fighting solutions won't work.

Re:Another surge on July 5 happened

[Critical Facilities]

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

Everyone knows in Soviet Russia, the commerce controls YOU.

Re:Another surge on July 5 happened

[GlennC]

Not to mention inquiries about one's preferred brand of crack and references to Natalie Portman.

Ah, the good old days.

Re:Another surge on July 5 happened

[technoid_]

If only I had a beowulf cluster of the posts.

They've really started branding their videos

[Anonymous Coward]

XHamster has started aggressively branding and marking the videos on their site. These videos are then uploaded elsewhere and suddenly, people see them. Given they started doing this about 2-3 months ago, it would coincide perfectly with this surge.

Re:They've really started branding their videos

[KingRatMass]

Fuck you... Pay for your porn then!

Back in my day, we had to use Zmodem to download porn PICTURES. It once took two days to masturbate because mom kept making phone calls and interrupting my download. We sometimes had to wait 16 hours from the time we saw nipple until we got bush.

Fucking ungrateful assholes... Get off my lawn!

Malware/Dead drop

[henry.cow]

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

Probably for C&C

[wulfhere]

Something like this is my guess:

https://arstechnica.com/securi...

India?

[Anonymous Coward]

As a frequent visitor of xhamster I can say that in the last weeks a big amount of Indian porn was uploaded. See explanation #1 in source.

Re:Add-ons

[Gay Boner Sex]

Nah, simpler than that. Whenever msmash posts a clickbait story, that generates traffic.

As in, this is a hoax story. Person A created a lot of "visitors" so that person B could write a story about the "anomaly." Persons A and B both either work or have interests in that company. Person C realizes what is going on and uses it to generate clickbait revenue on her Digg reincarnation, Slashdot, once touted a "News for Nerds" site.

Viral advertising

[LetterRip]

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'.

Re:simplest explanation: Google SEO change.

[doconnor]

I wouldn't be surprised if a Wikipedia page shows up in the top 4 link of 1/3 of all Google searches. There is nothing unusual about that.

Re:I blame Russia

[tattood]

Wikipedia should be able to see from the HTTP referrer header whether the visits are coming from a link on another site or not. This should not be a mystery.

Re:Add-ons

[Luthair]

He could be onto something, if add-ons pull text from Wikipedia for a description and don't cache it well...

Re:Add-ons

[Narcocide]

I was thinking something far more innocuous, like some tiny fascist dictatorship has banned all porn with a global proxy that filters everything based on request URL and referrer string comparisons. Then randomly one day someone notices that anything with a wikipedia referrer passes the filter and word gets out.

Re:Add-ons

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

It could correspond to an increased use of DuckDuckGo as a search engine default. DuckDuckGo typically includes a Wikipedia page in a feature box, next toits top-line search item, if a domain is typed in the URL bar without a TLD designator.
https://dl.dropboxusercontent....

Worth investigating.

if you duckduckgo xhamster the FIRST LINK is the w

[gl4ss]

an actual theory.

some country recently blocked xhamster domain for xxx censorship reasons. the people used to going there for their mobile porn fix instead end up on the wikipedia page.

if you duckduckgo xhamster the FIRST LINK is the wikipedia page.