Questions for International Paperclip

[Moontide]

What theme are you using?

[Dredge]

This thread kind of reminds me of "Ask the Governor" in New Jersey (just south of me).

[bookworm]

is there a mechanism to expel bots from this site and would such a mechanism be an ethical solution to the glaring inaccuracies shown here?

There's not much you can do about bots, and they don't harm the site, in fact, some are useful in that they index this site for search engines to aid discovery, so we don't see a need at the moment to reduce bot traffic.

You can't really prevent bots from poking at you, but you can prevent them from collecting information from what they poke at. Case in point this incident where we discovered that although the Google bot was frequently crawling the site it never relayed what it found to Google itself because we were never found by the search engine. The situation was remedied and we now appear as results.

So to answer the original question, no we can't do anything about the bots initially showing up which is what contributes to the inflated statistics. The most you can do is 'hang a sign' that makes them go away once they see it, but by then they're already here and their visit has been counted, so all it would do is prevent things like search engines from recording us which isn't what we want to do as SirWhit noted.

[snubs]

Why do the round icons for some announcements turn gray once they're read, while others stay reddish colored?

Because sometimes (for whatever reason) announcements don't seem to register that you've read them so the icon still indicates that it's "new". I have no idea why, but it happens to me too (I use greyscale3.0).

[Connie G.]

What theme are you using?

Blue ToO

[bookworm]

Perhaps it's related to how if you read them through City Hall you can't post replies. Maybe you have to open them from an open forum to register as read. No idea if that's the case, it's just a thought.