bizarre Flickr activity - can anyone explain this?

The day before yesterday, I kept getting emails - all day long - saying that people were adding me as a contact on Flickr. This continued thru yesterday, and only today has the inflow of contact notices slowed to a halt.

Over the past couple years, since I have been active on Flickr, I get about one of these notices every week or two. So, to get dozens of these notices in the past few days is very strange indeed.

Most of the people who are making me a new contact do not shoot wildlife, which seems very singular because in the past, almost everybody who added me as a contact was a dedicated wildlife/bird/nature specialist. Additionally odd is that most of these new contact people appear to be from foreign countries, whereas most of the other people I associate with on Flickr are based in the US or Canada.

Does anyone here have any idea what may be happening? Has this happened to others? Is this some sort of spam attack? Am I possibly the object of some type of fraud and/or image theft or copyright violation scandal? Any explanations, cautions, or advice would be appreciated.

Thank you

Are they all from a handful of countries? I've had a few random 'spam attacks' in other things online due to circles of new mothers looking for interesting things. One finds a group, such as a local astronomy group I volunteer with, and passes it around to half a dozen or so of her friends, who in turn pass info on to another half dozen. Suddenly in the space of a day or two we get contact hits from a hundred people or so.

But I really can't think of how a scam could work over flickr like you are describing so far. If they just wanted the photos you post why add you as a contact? They could just save your address and keep pulling the images with a bot.

How do your stats look? Maybe one of your images made it to the welcome page?

edit: on second thought, it's likely one of your images made explore. I get that kind of thing whenever an image makes explore, then everything goes quiet again after a few day.

Weird!

I had an abnormal spike in activity last week as well, although it was because of an update I did that was very popular around the internet... For big updates, I usually will max out at 10,000 to 12,000 views... On normal days, I range from 300-1,500 views... But last week, I had a spike of 30,000!

I guess it just depends where everything ends up.

After seeing this and checking out your Flickr, I added you. You have some very nice work there.

Scatterbrained wrote in post #16361522
How do your stats look? Maybe one of your images made it to the welcome page?

edit: on second thought, it's likely one of your images made explore. I get that kind of thing whenever an image makes explore, then everything goes quiet again after a few day.

Scattered,
I don't know how to see my "stats". And I must admit, I am not sure what you mean by "stats".

I did click on one of my images - the most recently added one. A couple people said, "congrats on explore" (in the comments under the image). So, I assume that the image "made explore", as you word it. What, exactly, is explore? I never received any notification about any of my images "making" anything. And I searched the Flickr site for the term "explore", and never really found a page that explained exactly what it is. All I get when I enter "explore" as a keyword on a Flickr-wide search is a page with a bunch of photos - a page that takes forever to load. No detailed explanations whatsoever.

Flickr can be fun, and a great research resource, but they seem to have their own terms for stuff, which can be quite confusing . . . even frustrating at times. Especially when there are no pages explaining, in detail, what those terms mean and how they are used.

bsmotril wrote in post #16369681
After seeing this and checking out your Flickr, I added you. You have some very nice work there.

Thanks, Bsmotril!

I have to agree, you have some amazing wildlife photos! Added you I think this may just be a ploy to bump up your followers....I kid! I kid!

Tom Reichner wrote in post #16369997
Scattered,
I don't know how to see my "stats". And I must admit, I am not sure what you mean by "stats".

I did click on one of my images - the most recently added one. A couple people said, "congrats on explore" (in the comments under the image). So, I assume that the image "made explore", as you word it. What, exactly, is explore? I never received any notification about any of my images "making" anything. And I searched the Flickr site for the term "explore", and never really found a page that explained exactly what it is. All I get when I enter "explore" as a keyword on a Flickr-wide search is a page with a bunch of photos - a page that takes forever to load. No detailed explanations whatsoever.

Flickr can be fun, and a great research resource, but they seem to have their own terms for stuff, which can be quite confusing . . . even frustrating at times. Especially when there are no pages explaining, in detail, what those terms mean and how they are used.


Thanks, Bsmotril!

Tom, paying members have access to their images viewing statistics day to day. You can track individual and overall image views that way as well as where the viewers are coming from (helpful to see if people are poaching your images for their blogs).

Explore is Flickr's pool of "specially selected" images. Every day they pick 500 images for "Explore". It is supposedly totally random. The higher up the count your image is the more views it will get. The more views/comments/favorit​es the image gets the higher up it goes and so on.

You just got another one
You have great images on there, doesn't look like a spam attack to me!

You can go here to see any and all of your EXPLORED! images...http://xplor-stats.com

Scatterbrained wrote in post #16370372
Explore is Flickr's pool of "specially selected" images. Every day they pick 500 images for "Explore". It is supposedly totally random. The higher up the count your image is the more views it will get. The more views/comments/favorit​es the image gets the higher up it goes and so on.

I may be wrong but I've read that the photos are chosed using some complex algorithym that no one understands. I think it's something to do with how many people comment/favourite the photo etc.

It's a measure Flickr use called "interestingness" but I don't think anyone knows how it's calculated...

Pretty sure it's not random as the same people seem to get a lot of photos in again and again, and a good proportion of the photos are impressive, but you also get some photos in there that are (in my opinion!) pretty terrible...

For example, today's selection has too many good photos in to be random I think:
http://www.flickr.com/​explore

I've added you too, you've got some great shots mate