Going from 86,000,000 a month to 31,000 a month is quite a drop, and the shift is pretty dramatic. It goes from 1.7 million one day to 715 the next and stays flat (http://stats.grok.se/en/201410/Special:Random). 

I was also thinking there could be a bot or something that is scraping Special:Random, but the drop also happens for Special:Random/Talk -- which hardly anybody uses, but it still drops flat the same day (http://stats.grok.se/en/201410/Special:Random/Talk). It doesn't happen for Special:Upload or Special:Log though.

October 16th, 2014 is the day it changes. Anybody know of something that might have changed that day with logging? Also, there have to be way more than ~1,000 hits a day to Special:Random. Perhaps pageviews started to be counted for the page that it got redirected to, rather than the Special:Random page itself. But then why wouldn't it go to 0? What are those ~1,000 hits a day? 

~~ it is a mystery ~~ 

On Mon, May 11, 2015 at 7:44 PM, Oliver Keyes <okeyes@wikimedia.org> wrote:

A reduction or alteration in automata activity, possibly? Erik's dumps
contain literally no filtering for scammers or crawlers, and we're a
hot locale for spammer activity.

On 11 May 2015 at 08:09, Alex Druk <alex.druk@gmail.com> wrote:
> I just grep monthly totals from Erik Zachte
> http://dumps.wikimedia.org/other/pagecounts-ez/merged/ (grep "^en.z
> Special:Random ")
>
> On Mon, May 11, 2015 at 2:00 PM,
> <wiki-research-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org> wrote:
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>>    1. Re: How to explain drop in random searches (Oliver Keyes)
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>> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> Message: 1
>> Date: Sun, 10 May 2015 08:30:37 -0400
>> From: Oliver Keyes <okeyes@wikimedia.org>
>> To: Research into Wikimedia content and communities
>>         <wiki-research-l@lists.wikimedia.org>
>> Subject: Re: [Wiki-research-l] How to explain drop in random searches
>> Message-ID:
>>
>> <CAAUQgdA6jVzgs3QQXVVgsh7MFthWxpD97uisDTJmjNUgZZXH5A@mail.gmail.com>
>> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
>>
>> Using what data?
>>
>> On 10 May 2015 at 05:29, Alex Druk <alex.druk@gmail.com> wrote:
>> > Hi everyone,
>> >
>> >
>> >
>> > I try to learn dynamic of random searches (Special:Random) on English
>> > Wikipedia.
>> >
>> > From 01/2012 to 10/2014 average number of random searches per month was
>> > about 86 millions or about 30% of Main_Page pageviews, but from November
>> > 2014 it drop to 31,000 per month (or 0.008% of Main_page).
>> >
>> > How to explain such a dramatic drop? Any ideas?
>> >
>> >
>> > --
>> > Thank you.
>> >
>> > Alex Druk, PhD
>> > wikipediatrends.com
>> > alex.druk@gmail.com
>> > (775) 237-8550 Google voice
>> >
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>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Oliver Keyes
>> Research Analyst
>> Wikimedia Foundation
>>
>>
>>
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>
>
>
> --
> Thank you.
>
> Alex Druk
> alex.druk@gmail.com
> (775) 237-8550 Google voice
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--
Oliver Keyes
Research Analyst
Wikimedia Foundation

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