SL Stats reporting failing on various websites

[arabellajones]

There are many websites that have been reporting basic stats, such as concurrency, for all the time I have been using SL. But all of them seem to have stopped getting updates at various times over the last couple of months, most recently https://eregion.kicks-ass.net/munin/servers/akari.eregion.home/SL_Online_Now.html which stopped updating on Tuesday. It's less clear when https://e*****up.com/slstats/concurrency/ stopped getting data, but it seems to have been a couple of weeks ago. Point is, it's not all at the same time, so it's unlikely to be some change to the API. And Firestorm is still reporting a changing concurrency figure.

These charts did give some sign of connection problems, you could see if there was a sudden drop in numbers, when it had happened, and whether it was continuing. And, unlike a web page from Linden Lab, it didn't vanish when somebody plugged in a vacuum cleaner.

A wild guess, but I know some sites watch out for repeated requests from the same IP address, and block automated requests when they exceed a limit. The requests made by the Firestorm viewer don't all come from the same IP address, so that sort of filtering would fit what I see. Add a bit of security by obscurity to the thinking.

It doesn't help that I am using Linux: there's not much chance of getting a straight answer from Linden Lab. Also, I'm in Europe, and I am usually tucked up in bed when those in-world meetings with the Lindens happen. So somebody else is going to have to ask.

[animats]

The Linden Labs XML data is partially broken. It looks like this:

<stats>
  <status>ONLINE</status>
  <signups>59,724,187</signups>
  <logged_in_last_60>Loading...</logged_in_last_60>
  <transactions>Loading...</transactions>
  <inworld>31,498</inworld>
</stats>

That's where web sites get SL concurrency. Yes, it actually returns "Loading..." in the XML data. I don't think that the transaction data has been released for years. SL used to issue statements about numbers for the SL economy. Then they started dropping.