It is now 7AM for me, 6AM for you and when I look at the little stat at the bottom of the page, it says 87 guests online, 1 user (me).
87 guests?? Most online today 105. Who are these people?
Or are they bots scurrying for info?
Just curious, I mean, we are of course of major importance to the world, but 87 lurkers?
Thanks for raising this. Yes, that's curious. At the moment there are 23 guests, which I think means that the site has been visited within a particular timeframe from 23 different IP addresses.
Some of them will be real people, perhaps lurkers or people viewing the site from a Google result. Some might be search engine spiders, indexing the site for search results. My guess is that some of them, most of them perhaps are some sort of bot / spider looking for forums to deploy spam on.
I notice that there were 534 guests online on July 02, 2022 at 02:03:38 AM. Wild.
Fortunately we're a lightweight site - mainly text represented in simple MySQL entries so the consequences aren't serious. I haven't seen the site get overloaded and I don't think they're costing me significant money. But I think I'll have a look through the server logs and check for referring URLs and IP address locations.
There's an extension for the site software (SMF) that allows an admin to set a maximum number for online guests. Regular users with a login would not be affected. Might be worth setting up. I could also look into doing something at the server level to block persistent IPs from China, if that turns out to be the source of the bulk of the IPs. I've seen that before when I worked at a web-hosting firm..
I've installed a reporting package and it's analysed the logs. Turns out that bots and spiders are consuming the majority of the bandwidth used by the site.
I have a couple of options - one is to make the site invisible to guests (just to be clear that's people visiting the site who aren't logged in or don't have accounts). Or I can install the extension I mentioned in the last post.
It looks from a glance at the actual server logs that Amazon bots are mainly to blame, surprisingly. But that's not conclusive.
So as you'll have seen I've disallowed "guest" access. We're still getting hits from large numbers of guests (30 "online" as I type, which actually means 30 hits from different IPs in the last 15 mins).
I'm hoping that, because they're now blocked at the front page they won't be able to suck bandwidth, except very minimally. But I'll have a look at the stats tomorrow night.
User jasonattab could do with binning..
Ooh, 11 newcomers in the past 5 days. Wonder what they have to say ::)
Quote from: Thenop on January 24, 2025, 06:10:25 PMOoh, 11 newcomers in the past 5 days. Wonder what they have to say ::)
Well jasonattab hasn't much to say..
Quote from: Fishy on January 24, 2025, 05:09:09 PMUser jasonattab could do with binning..
I've done this, I hadn't seen a post but perhaps someone else has removed some spam. Thanks for the heads up. I did see a spam link in their sig.
The other new users are most likely all dodgy as well but on the off-chance that one or more of them is a benign lurker, I'll leave them in place until they cause offence.
And another davidfeerm
Robertfeerm Having a go now
I deleted the earlier post, apologies for not mentioning it
No worries at all. Thanks for taking care of it.