Freesound Forums

Good to rember this post in this topic

frederic.font wrote:
Hi everyone,

This is an interesting case. These downloads are not happening through the API because we would have different records for them. I checked some logs and it seems to be a bot that regularly checks the last uploaded sounds (probably using the search page and sorting by date) and downloads new ones. These sounds might not yet be in the front page because the front page updates at a slightly slower rate than the search page.

Even though it is true that such downloads kind of bias the statistics, such usage is probably fine. Also, we don't have resources to manually investigate each of these cases. What could be done in the future is to do some sort of estimation of bot behavior that would allow us to remove bot downloads from download counts, but this is not trivial.

Why are admins silent?

Remember that Freesound is a project run by an incredibly small team at a public university. We have very limited time, and technical maintenance and development takes a big share of it. We check the forums from time to time and try to participate (specially in conversations that we started), but there are many things that we don't read. Sometimes the moderators will send me a private message to draw our attention to a specific topic and then we answer. Feel free to do so when there are relevant discussion in which our input is missing and needed.

Indeed, bot's aren't a big problem. It's not something that "will be fixed" nor an immediate ban/account deletion etc... as from my understanding it's not an offence.
Still worth listing them when we see them