Who keeps downloading bug report saves?

[secelt]

while perusing the Bug Reports subforum, i noticed that almost every save attachment — really, every attachment in general — has been downloaded at least a handful of times, sometimes even in the double digits. i assume that the developers could probably only account for maybe 2 or 3 of those downloads at most, so someone (or something) else must be downloading them. my questions are who and why?

are they just LLM scrapers and Web archiving bots downloading with reckless abandon? or are they real human beings? if so, what do they get out of it? are they curious looky‐loos eager to spy on strangers’ bases? (if so, the Galaxy Of Fame might be their Heaven.) are they amateur QA testers looking to test their mettle in the wild? are they data hoarders addicted to burning through their unlimited Internet access plans? (although i already mentioned LLM scrapers. ) or are they black‐hat hackers hoping that someone left their bank account password in the description of a constant combinator?

if you download Factorio saves from bug reports (and aren’t a Factorio developer yourself), please let me know why you do so. i’m just curious!

[Loewchen]

I think those are just bots clicking links, you don't need to actually download the file to increment the counter.

[secelt]

I think those are just bots clicking links, you don't need to actually download the file to increment the counter.

fair enough, i suppose, but some bug reports have way more save downloads than others, even ones without any replies (such as this one, picked at random). surely those can’t all be bot downloads, right?

[edit:] for context and posterity, at time of writing, the linked post had the following download counts on its attachments:

[heading start] ATTACHMENTS [heading end]
[link start] Buffer platform test.zip [link end]
(1.76 MiB) Downloaded 19 times
[link start] factorio-current.log [link end]
(8.44 KiB) Downloaded 25 times

Screen Shot 2026-08-07 at 17.15.09.png (8.41 KiB) Viewed 223 times

[mmmPI]

If you want to report a bug, and find a report that describe something that ressemble the report you were about to make when you used the research to see if your bug was already reported, and there's a save game, so you download it, to make sure it's the same thing or not.

[eugenekay]

I enjoy downloading the variety of different bases that people include in their Bug Reports. Sometimes you learn new things about game mechanics or find pretty patterns in their wall layout.

Everybody has to have a hobby, I guess?

[Loewchen]

I think downloads of curiosity, devs or others with the issue are negligible, in this desync bug report: viewtopic.php?p=691422#p691422 the save files are uploaded independently and would be way more convenient to access than the actual report for someone just wanting to take a look, and yet every file in the post even the dump file has roughly the same downloads with the saves actually having the fewest.

[mmmPI]

I think similar, most likely curiosity devs or others with the issue accounts for some of the descrepancies between numbers, but are not representing the majority of the dowloads by far.
There's always been a lot of those bots, creating fake account and doing advertisement, when it's not just old search engine crawler or newer.