Somewhat in agreement with the 2021 flag data in that US, France and Thailand are big hitters. But flags have GB top but they’re not in the top 5 for traffic. Also Malaysia, China and Russia are above Germany and Taiwan in flags but not traffic. Strange given UN and pirate are not on flag list. Probably down to the way traffic is measured by SimilarWeb (I don’t know how they do it) and that flag does not necessarily mean you are accessing from the country, e.g. maybe a lots of Brits living abroad
There are some holes. Some countries are present just for one year, others have discontinuous values.
United Nations’ value for 2019 is huge. UK changes from hundreds to thousands in 2020.
Is there a reason for such numbers?
I understand that some country could emerge in the top 10 just for one year. But UN and UK data look weird.
Also the overall number of players, changing from 6k, 7k then 28k, 21k, 13k… was there some sort of ranking system adjustment?
How is that your charts have such big changes over time?
If you were looking at OGS accounts, I’d expect them to just increase.
To catch variations for a single player you should sample data frequently (as I do for TTY) but of course you aren’t doing that since 2014.
The UN spike is undoubtedly due to the huge spam bot invasion that we experienced in 2019. One characteristic of the spam bots is that they all had a UN flag.
The spam bots then and subsequently do not play go. The accounts don’t do anything. That is why the mod team, when we realized that, stopped banning the spam accounts. The accounts typically had advertisements in their bio section for things like plumbing or electrical services, or sex-related stuff. However, it is virtually impossible for anyone ever to see them, since they don’t play or do anything else.
