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jayceeaz
Starting Member
11 Posts |
 Posted - 23 September 2004 : 21:47:10
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I do not know if this is the appropriate forum, but I am certain you guys know a lot more about this creepy, sneaky web stuff than I do.
First let me say, I love Snitz. It is so easy to work with, and I am modified the hell out of my original code easily and run a very slick site (for my gaming community).
I have had the Active Users mod for some time, and very frequently sit on that page just to see the activity on my site. In the last 2 mos, and only in spikes it seems, I suddenly see 20+ "Guests" hitting the site in a completely random manner. Some land immediately on my photo album, some on member profiles (which they cannot see as Guest anyway), my game Roster (which is not even a part of Snitz!!), and many topic areas. Hell, even landing on Category selections!
I sometimes see many from the same IP block (demographic), and I know - pretty much certain - these are not all users coming from the same place all of a sudden (see screenie)
My question is, what the hell is this stuff? Sometimes up to 2000 hits a day (according to ipGate). They never "wander" the site, just land on a link and sit there til they time out. They are NEVER showing a browser config (see screenie), and they only started happening when I installed an add-on to Active Users that was supposed to send someone a list of all webBots that visited my site. Prior to that, I had never encountered this phenomenon.
Any clue what this is? How to stop it? It's more annoying than anything, as I doubt they are soaking up my GB/mo or anything... but 2000 hits a day? C'mon...
TIA for input.
Jc
www.theaterofdreamsmt.com
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laser
Advanced Member
Australia
3859 Posts |
Posted - 23 September 2004 : 22:23:48
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I checked a few of those IPs and they are all from jeteye.com I'd say it is a search engine spider, but just not in your list of known spiders (update the list to reflect this maybe). Guests (spiders) doing this sort of stuff is typical - it's scary sometimes how I can edit a user's profile or do something that I know I ALONE did and suddenly 2-3 spiders are hitting the same url.
Oh, and they do suck bandwidth as well, because they are still accessing the site. |
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Tiggerz
Starting Member
45 Posts |
Posted - 24 September 2004 : 18:34:52
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| Not sure what firewall you have - but you could block the IP/Domain. Thats what I am doing - just hard catch the beggers. |
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sy
Average Member
United Kingdom
638 Posts |
Posted - 25 September 2004 : 11:33:36
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There are things you can do to stop this, once you know what is happening, complain to the people ordering the bot, and say it is costing you resources.
Maybe something in the robots faq could stop this, I had a problem with 'brokers' too.
http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/faq.html |
The pessimist complains about the wind; the optimist expects it to change; the realist adjusts the sails
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laser
Advanced Member
Australia
3859 Posts |
Posted - 25 September 2004 : 23:39:25
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| Yes, well, if you want to stop it then a robots.txt file, but then people can't find your site using serach engine results ... you have to choose one or the other : bandwidth used, and in the search engine -OR- no bandwidth used, no search engine. |
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jayceeaz
Starting Member
11 Posts |
Posted - 27 September 2004 : 16:19:40
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Hey gang, thank you very much for the replies. That's what I thought it was too, and I am so very bummed that they feel the need to infringe on my site. I have never submitted myself to a search engine, as it is not a public website, really. Those who need to know, know. :)
The part that's "scarey" to me is that someone has tendrils into our browsers and logs or ID's where we go, and propogates that data. If this is an incorrect assumption, please correct me. I am super paranoid about privacy, and even the thought of someone thinking it's ok to do this creeps me out.
I will look into how to block or stop this. There are so many hits per day, I would have a rather large "deny" list to stop these IPs. As for my firewall, I do not host the site myself, but through a 2rd party... so I doubt there's much I can do there to deny access. I DO have IPGate installed tho. Maybe that's an option.
How do you find out who owns the IP? ping or whois or tracert? It's likely I'll go to the offender, send a request to stop pinging my site, and wind up on someone's adult spam list. 
Thanks again for the input.
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