Since 2025, a suspicious trend emerged in IndieDB & ModDB (websites from the parent platform dbolical.com). The sites became filled with AI bots and crawlers that arrive en masse and inflate metrics simply to extract information or give a false sense of success to users.
I will show you some evidence that I have reported from the Dicord server:
1. I detected patterns of sudden increases that slowly rise.
2. Almost all views (and downloads) are detected as "unknown referrer".
Or even come from very strange origins.
3. Bots and crawlers usually impersonate Mac OS X users scattered across certain Firefox and Chrome versions.
I've included the following links so you can verify it:
IndieDB online members: https://www.indiedb.com/members/online
ModDB online members: https://www.moddb.com/members/online
4. It's not a definitive confirmation yet, but I suspect that most of the "Macbots" come under the names "Member #Nº" and "Anonymous #Nº", because in these two types they don't have their own profile when touching the links.
What do you get as a result of publishing on these sites? Hundreds or thousands of page or article views artificially accumulated (especially if they are games that have been published for several years).
The DBolical team are aware of the problem and have made some attempts to curb such traffic; they worked, but only in the short term, as the crawlers returned within a few days or weeks each time they were blocked.
I've seen so much of the incident that I no longer believe what DBolical will do about it, since his administration is not capable of solving the problem efficiently and for as long as possible. That's why I don't recommend any dev upload games or mods to IndieDB/ModDB.
