Question about site visitor behavior.

Comes almost every day.

[grandma genie]

Hi phranque and physics and all,
I have a visitor to my site (seen in server logs) who comes almost every day and looks at the same page on my site, then leaves. Can you decipher what this dude is doing? Is it a bot? I can't tell. The IP is from Chicago. Here is a sample from the logs:

76.193.nn.nn - - [02/Sep/2010:14:38:01 -0400] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 30601 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.2.8) Gecko/20100722 Firefox/3.6.8"
76.193.nn.nn - - [04/Sep/2010:09:49:52 -0400] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 30603 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.2.8) Gecko/20100722 Firefox/3.6.8"
76.193.nn.nn - - [05/Sep/2010:17:12:18 -0400] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 31292 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.2.8) Gecko/20100722 Firefox/3.6.8"

76.193.nn.nn - - [11/Sep/2010:10:15:23 -0400] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 31292 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.2.9) Gecko/20100824 Firefox/3.6.9"
76.193.nn.nn - - [10/Sep/2010:12:37:34 -0400] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 304 - "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.2.9) Gecko/20100824 Firefox/3.6.9"
76.193.nn.nn - - [09/Sep/2010:18:30:58 -0400] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 31292 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.2.9) Gecko/20100824 Firefox/3.6.9"

The user agent string changes slightly every so often, but it is the same dude. Always looking at the same page. Can anyone tell from the log what is going on. They never buy anything, just look, then leave. I also notice the IP address (last two sets of numbers) changes every month or so. This has been going on since at least April 2010.

Grandma_genie

[phranque]

that is a home page request ("/" is the root directory)
if i had to guess, this visitor has set your home page to be the the default home page for their browser, so each time the browser is opened a request for your home page is sent.
this visitor is also probably on a dynamic IP address, so each time the ISP assigns a new IP you see a request from a different address in the same block.

[grandma genie]

So I should be flattered that someone would want my home page to be their home page. Thank you, phranque, for clearing that up for me. Now if I could just get them to buy something. ;)

[Lapizuli]

Could this also be somebody's saved session? I end a session with several tabs open, then have the browser save 'em for when I open it next.

[aristotle]

I had a similar mystery on one of my sites, except that this unknown person downloaded the same page about 60 times in one day. What makes it even stranger is that the page in question is a pdf file about 2.2 megabytes size containing a lot of notes and reference information, a page which most visitors to the site never bother to look at. Luckily this unknown person only kept coming for one day, or I might have had to start worrying about bandwidth usage.

Why would someone download the same page 60 times in one day? I'm baffled.

[piatkow]

If you study your logs you will see lots of strange behaviour, most of it clearly down to human behaviour rather than to bots.
I regularly see people come to the same page with the same Google search several times within a couple of minutes.
There is a visitor comes to my site every few days looks at the home page and goes away again. The home page never changes, its an intro and links to the info in the site.

[grandma genie]

Lapizuli, Would a saved session last for months? I think phranque's idea sounds more plausible. aristotle: Maybe the person had to keep going back to that page and the pdf automatically downloaded every time? piatkow: Does the visitor come from the same referrer? Or does it look like they have bookmarked the page? My home page is also an intro page to my site, which is very extensive. So, someone making it their home page sounds reasonable to me. Thanks for all your comments.

[Lapizuli]

grandma genie,

I'm embarrassed to say it, but yes. We're always hollering at each other about how long it takes the browser to open because we each have, like, twenty different tabs open in the session. "I'll read those pages eventually!" we say. Eventually we do spring cleaning.

So it can happen. Likely? I don't think it's common, but I suspect it happens occasionally.

I do kinda think of a saved session as a home page, only a dynamic one rather than a static one. Saving a session is a passive way of changing the home page(s) each time the browser closes.

The only reason I suggested it is that when a visitor has no activity on the site, that seemed more likely to happen when there are a lot of pages in the session that open each time the browser opens, and if the site is not of the sort to be frequently used or consciously marked as a home page.

But I can't read the logs like phranque can, and phranque's interpretation sounds very plausible to me, too.