Absent any hard evidence, but as someone with my ear to the ground about
other sites, I'm gonna take a stab in the dark and assume that those "guests" are actually AI bot agents that are trying to index and gobble up any useful information that they can about the site.
This is happening quite frequently elsewhere, see:
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/03/d...ire-countries/
And since MobileRead is a well-known trove of technical information about e-readers, tablets, etc, it would not surprise me if AI is targeting it for consumption in the same way that they would, say, Reddit.
Just a theory. Like I said, I have nothing to back this up other than a hunch. There hasn't been a recent news event (like the Kindle D&T removal) that would suddenly force a bunch of refugees to this site looking for information.