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IndieDB/ModDB is a bot/crawler farm! Don't public any game/mod!

A topic by Ofihombre created 2 days ago Views: 253 Replies: 18

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Ofihombre2 days ago(+1)

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.

Ofihombre2 days ago

P.S: Even I called for a drastic measure, such as disable the JS chart-based statistics system as they work to figure out the problem until they solve it

redonihunter1 day ago

I am not sure what your point is and what you are a showing here.

People using private browsing features will not show a referer.

This site has embed buttons for promotions. That strange referal looks like a faulty embedded one.

You are on Steam. Those spikes seem to correlate a bit with the seasonal sales Steam has. Even without that, seasonal ups and down are to be expected and you have a portfolio of games and not ony one game.

Whatever statistic you are showing here, this is max 200 daily views. The average daily views is more like 25. This is not a stable regular counter. It will be highly susceptible to any kind of promotion and random fluctuation. This is not a news site people check daily. If they visit your projects, they visited it and need not visit for some time.

And if you compare to other projects, do you find those same patterns? I did not. If this were mostly bot traffic, why target your pages? Why not everyone?

The usernames you posted (do not do such things, btw.) are users that are logged in. The page has a guest counter. And bot counter.

Statistics

Online 8

Guests 2,006

Bots 630

So your illegitimate bots would not be members, but guests or bots. No clue what the regular bots do. And why so many.

The only strange thing here is the popularity of mac os. They only have a market share of like 25%, and Windows 60%. Are the games posted on those sites maybe more popular for mac os users? Other users going straight to Steam or even Itch?

So unless this site is charging you money for "visitors", I do not see the problem here. Your "evidence" does not convince me of your traffic being mostly bots. And my strongest critique is, that you only looked at your own traffic. Look at other projects. I looked at some that pop up in the popular today bracket and checked their statistics. Some of those had a max peak of 20 for the last year. And I did not notice any strange patterns, like from 20 to 200 several times. Some had singular "spikes", but going from 10 to 100 is only a spike, because the numbers are small. Statistics on small numbers are fickle.

Ofihombre1 day ago (3 edits)

I think that because you didn't quite understand my point, it sounds as if what you said was from someone who hasn't been an IndieDB or ModDB user, and just when the online member numbers were apparently back to normal.

IndieDB's typical traffic is 1500-2500 members per day, while ModDB's is less than 8000. When there are times when daily traffic exceeds 10,000 per day, it means there is unusual traffic within the sites, and the reason there are so many Mac users on both platforms is because of what I mentioned at the beginning, and it's not the bots registered within the counter, but a different class that masquerades as part of the guest counter.

In my first point, the unusual graph between October and December of last year was the most obvious sign of bot traffic; there were detectable patterns, and my games weren't the only ones affected:

This graphic belongs to "World of Padman". There you will also notice the same pattern that I had detected in my stats.

If you want to know more about the topic, I recommend that you speak with the DBolical administration.

I also don't rule out that some of the visits under the unknown referrer are normal users using private browsing functions (which is respectable), but that doesn't change the fact that visits from bots and crawlers can also be included.

redonihunter1 day ago

I think that because you didn't quite understand my point

I literally told you so...

and my games weren't the only ones affected

I did pull up some games from that page and had a look. I did look at the previous year. I did not see what you seem to see.

There you will also notice the same pattern that I had detected in my stats.

I do not. The spike in July is missing.

Your argument, as far as I understand it, is this:

You see spikes of traffic on that site. You see things that seem strange. You assume that this is mostly bot activity. You know that the site owners do something against bot traffic. It is not good enough in your eyes. Therefore you advise people to not use that site.

Thing is, you do not need to construct a premise of bot activity. You can just cite the site admins where they do adress this and claim they are aware of bot activity and try to curb them.

But then you go on to call for an action. That people avoid that platform, because the bot activity is not curbed enough. What the? Why?

Ofihombre1 day ago (2 edits) (+1)

I read that you are trying to clarify my half-truths for me, but not in the best way, but I will explain it to you.

The reason why you didn't see the same pattern is because it hasn't affected all games in the same way, and you also haven't found all the correct examples. World of Padman it's one of the examples that best matches my example, but it only covers it from October to December.

Don't you see a coincidence in 2025 July's case? Let me show you the following example:

This graphic belongs to Garry's Mod.

Let's compare it with this other one. Can you tell me if there's a match between the two, even in the data for July 2025?

And regarding your final paragraphs; it's okay, I confess:

The reason why I didn't want to recommend any developers from the beginning of this thread after the incident is because last Friday I was already fed up after seeing that the 1,000 visit mark was surpassed, but without receiving any comments or downloads in return.

That's what makes the visits feel so artificial. If there were 1000 integral views that generated comments and downloads, it would mean my games are good and attract attention.

I was afraid that the other devs would experience the same thing as me, that at first the traffic from crawlers or bots would give them a false sense of success, only to later begin to suspect that something was wrong.

redonihunter16 hours ago (1 edit)

Now there, arguing that views on that site are useless and maybe suspect, if they do not result in downloads and comments, is something different than arguing that you see "patterns" and because of patterns those views are bots.

You do not need to construct a pattern based bot invasion. Because those patterns can be explained by other means. Even if you find games that show similar patterns, that does not prove anything specific. For video games there are seasonal effects. And even for a small platform, a popular game can attract new people to the platform itself and those new people might check out a lot of games at the same time, resulting in a lot of spikes for a lot of games at the same time.

There is two things here, and you do not separate them. One is bots visiting the site. For that you need just cite the relevant information from the site admins talking about that. Or just look at the bot counter they show. I do not know what these bots are for, and why it is 600+. And why the site knows they are bots, but does not block them. The only question here is, if those 600+ bot crawlers are shown in the statistic as views. I do not think so. It is 600+ and the spikes you show are well below 600. Also, it would be very unusual to count a crawler as a visitor.

The other is, that views are not resulting in downloads. The problem is, the first will not prove the second. Unless you can convince people that all the traffic is from bots. The number of views from bots is bound to be an absolute number and not a percentage. There is a countable number of bots, even if you do not know the number. The kind of bot that does illegitimate things and does not identify itself as a bot. Crawlers visiting a site is normal and would not show up as a visitor, unless it is malconfigured or intentional.

The gary mod statistic has a baseline of about 500. The height of the spike is 2500. So how many bots are there? And why is your spike not 2500, but 200? Why do the bots selectively target games and ignore others? Even if those crawlers are shown in the view statistic, maybe this just reflects an increased interest in the topics of a game. Those crawlers do summary snippets and other things. If people are interested in garys mod, more crawlers will try to summarize the pages of garys mod.

So let's talk about "downloads". The statistic you showed does have increase in downloads at those peaks. Up from 0 to a few and for the November spike even rising with the spike. Is there an expected conversion rate for that site? Do people go to this site to actually download a game? When I go to an example indie game like this one, I see a "download" button that does not show files, unless expanded. And it shows a link to Steam and to Itch.

This is my personal preference of course, but that db site is ad-ridden and almost unuseable. It ranks quite low in my own trust, and frankly I do not know that site and do not know how to navigate it. That game in particular has 8 different demo versions to download. There is not even version numbers. Just a dump of downloads to sort through. And I did mention, that the download needs to be expanded, while there is an attractive Steam button below? ;-)

Would I download from there? Nah. I would check the game out on Steam. Or maybe Itch. Also, the game is in early access. While I am not a user of that indiedb site, I probably would not go there to download games that are still in alpha or beta. Also the site has DB in it's name. I do not go to imDB to watch movies, I go there for information about the movie.

So is this free advertisement by having your game on indiedb a waste of time? Crawlers can find it there. And according to your arguments, they do that a lot and inflate your view counter. You are just disappointed because you do not see a direct increase in downloads. What do you think those bots do with the information? Do you think they increase the view counter just for fun? That information goes somewhere, and can result in someone knowing about the game and maybe even checking it out - at whatever place.

It will also appear in search results. This currently gives me these answers: Steam. Itch. SteamDB. Weebly Homepage. Youtube. ModDB. Nekoweb. Reddit. indiedb. Gamespress.

Ofihombre15 hours ago

For your information, everything I've discussed has never been for a case of bots that are clearly detected as such within the bot counter, but rather for those bots and crawlers that impersonate Mac users and are counted as "guests".

Don't you understand the difference? What I was trying to demonstrate in the patterns between the statistics of my games, Padman and Garry's Mod, are due to the bots from guest counter, not from the bot counter.

I also haven't used Randy & Manilla's statistics for promotion, but rather to use them as an example of why such incidents were happening, although I don't rule out that their big presence in the search results may have influenced it to a great extent.

I can agree that IndieDB isn't the preferred site for downloading games, mainly because of the number of ads; that's why some people opt for ad blockers, as well as being a catalyst for later downloads or purchases on itch.io or Steam, so in that sense I shouldn't care about the visits if people get it from somewhere else. But even on IndieDB people often download and comment there, especially in the past decade (when the site was more frequently used).

redonihunter13 hours ago

but rather for those bots and crawlers that impersonate Mac users and are counted as "guests"

And you have any proof for that? What's the motivation? Who is gaining from this? Who does this? Why impersonate mac users? Would it not be more clever for bad bots to impersonate the expected user agents representing a general audience?

You just said the site was previously more popular. Maybe it is still popular for mac users for whatever reasons. At least more popular than for windows users, that is. A few hundred users is not a big number to do statistics. A single school or university fitted with computers for the students could dominate such a statistic.

What I was trying to demonstrate in the patterns between the statistics of my games, Padman and Garry's Mod, are due to the bots from guest counter

You build a premise that itself is based on assumptions. What you showed as evidence is not conclusive and the big flaw is: even if there was a correlation between games, you could not prove that it would be because of a bot traffic wave hitting those games.

So am I to believe that this alleged bot wave traffic selectively hit some games with 2000 hits and others with 200 hits and still others not significantly at all? How does your hypothesis explain this mismatch of supposed bot activity?

This is almost as bad as: I see lights in the sky, therefore aliens. You just jump to your conclusion, it must be the ~~aliens~~ bots that are visible there.

I am critizising your chain of logic here. Your observations are not explanations. They are observations. And the only thing you show here is, that the view to download ratio is rather bad on that site. And even that is not true, it seems.

AI are good for that sort of summary. I asked what ratio to expect on indie gaming sites. It gave me these numbers.

1–3% downloads per view — common for an average listing

3–10% — solid performance

10%+ — very strong, usually a highly targeted audience, compelling page, or game-jam/viral traffic

Below 1% — not necessarily bad; often caused by broad exposure, weak store-page messaging, paid games, or visitors who already own the game

And your so called unusal spikes of bot activity fit this ratio. You do have like 1 download per 100 views. Sometimes 4 downloads for 53 views. Then one day 216 views and 3 downloads, next day 162 views and 1 download. And the traffic below 50 often has 0 downloads.

Nothing in the data of that Randy game seems suspicous to me at the moment. You do not have 1000 views and 0 downloads. And if your views pass into the hundreds you do have a proportional download ratio near 1%, which is to be expected.

Ofihombre12 hours ago

I'm running out of ideas. The more you try to refute my arguments, the more stupid I feel trying to find solid evidence.

This discussion is proving very unproductive and is not leading anywhere. Wouldn't it have been much easier to explain the whole case to the Dbolical administration, and after they gave us their conclusions, they could give us a verdict on which of us is more right?

Regarding your example of 1,000 views and 0 downloads, what happened on Friday the 18th didn't come from just one game, it came from almost all of mine combined.

KozmoWorks1 day ago

I’m a developer on this platform too, and I completely agree with Ofihombre here.

When you spend time making games or mods, you look at your stats to see if real people actually care about your work. Seeing a sudden jump of 1,000 views but getting exactly 0 downloads and 0 comments is just a ghost town effect. That's not normal human behavior, and it's definitely not just "people using private browsing."

Redoni The reason this is a big deal for us devs is that it ruins our data. If we can't trust our view counts, we can't tell if our projects are actually getting popular or if it's just bots scraping the site. It makes the whole dashboard useless.

Thanks for showing the data from Garry's Mod and World of Padman, Ofihombre. It proves this is a real platform issue and you’re definitely not the only one noticing it.

Ofihombre1 day ago

Thanks for helping me, although we also have to understand Redoni's point. He was trying to demonstrate points that perhaps it works in a different way than I do in the case I am reporting on.

KozmoWorks1 day ago(+1)

Well said, Ofihombre. And yeah, fair point, Redoni raised some good arguments about how small stats can be super random and tricky to read. It's cool to see how different people look at the same data.

In the end, I think we all just want the platform to be as accurate as possible for creators.

redonihunter15 hours ago

Complaining that the statistical data on that platform is useless is not the same as calling out the platform as useless. When searching a game from OP that game's indiedb page only appeared at #9 in results. That "low" number would be the indicator that indiedb is far less important than Itch or Steam. But it does show up. People preferring that site can go there and look up information about the game there. If they download there, is another question. I would not. I would go to other places for the actual download.

My main issue was the chain of logic. It does not hold up. You can't infer bots from those patterns and the other oddities. The only thing you can direcly see, is, that people do not use indiedb to download a game very much and there are a lot of other plausible reasons for that. Also, there actually was a rise in downloads with the November spike correlating with the bigger spike in November.

KozmoWorks15 hours ago

Redoni i think you're still missing the most definitive proof here. You're saying we can't infer bots just from patterns, but you are forgetting that Ofihombre literally stated the DBolical administration already confirmed the issue and actively tried to block this specific traffic.

Platform admins don't spend time writing filters and blocking IPs for "random fluctuations" or "private browsing humans." If the people running the servers classify it as bot traffic and take measures to stop it, then it IS bot traffic. That completely validates the logic.

As for Google ranking, ranking #9 doesn't justify a platform having corrupted analytics dashboards for its creators. We aren't arguing about whether the site is completely useless to find a game; we are arguing that the stats system is broken, which is exactly why Ofihombre's points are valid.

redonihunter13 hours ago

that Ofihombre literally stated the DBolical administration already confirmed the issue

Then why not simply cite this. Instead a non conclusive mess of oddidites is presented as evidence. Did those admins say how much such traffic there is, and if they remove such traffic from statistics?

We aren't arguing about whether the site is completely useless to find a game; we are arguing that the stats system is broken

No, we do not. You might. Ofi is not. And I am pointing out the flaws in Ofi's logic.

The thread's title is:

IndieDB/ModDB is a bot/crawler farm! Don't public any game/mod!

I think that is supposed to mean publish and not public. Ofi calls for other people to not use this platform and claims it is used to simulate traffic, rather than there being genuine traffic.

Ofi is not arguing that the statistics of that site are broken and should not be used for marketing analysis. It is a call to boycott that site.

redonihunter12 hours ago (1 edit)

Redoni i think you're still missing the most definitive proof here. You're saying we can't infer bots just from patterns, but you are forgetting that Ofihombre literally stated the DBolical administration already confirmed the issue

That there is a confirmed bot problem on this site does not mean, you can infer it just from patterns. One does not follow from the other.

And most importantly, I do not happen to see those alleged patterns. What I see is perfectly normal traffic to download ratio for an indie game on a less popular platform.

When the views go up, so go the downloads. That directly contradicts this assumption that the views are mostly patterns of bot traffic.

So from what I know currently, I assume that most of this bot traffic is either removed from the statistic, or the games of Ofi are just not hit by that fake traffic.

I did check out a few other games from the currently popular sorting of that site. They had even less traffic than Ofi's game. And no such patterns.

KozmoWorks12 hours ago

You are replying to yourself now, which shows you're just trying to force your theory.

You say downloads went up with the views, so it can't be bots. But as developers, we know exactly how web crawlers and modern AI scrapers work. They don't just look at a page; they script click every single link on it, including the download buttons, to scan the files and data. That’s why both metrics inflated artificially at the exact same time.

Ofi already proved with the Garry's Mod and World of Padman charts that these spikes are synchronized across completely different games. If you choose to ignore synced charts, admin confirmation, and basic web crawler behavior just to protect your own opinion, that's fine. But the developer community sees the ghost traffic for what it is.

I'm done debating this.

Ofihombre12 hours ago

I admit I was sensationalist in choosing the title to grab attention. And what you call a boycott wasn't done to make the site sink even further; what I wanted was for it to improve and regain its credibility.

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