Good morning,
Over the past few weeks I have been working on an issue that has been bugging me. If you look at the amount of people online it shows there are thousands online at any time. I have tried figuring out why this user count is so high. And I installed a new program a few weeks ago which gave me some better insight. (You can see some of these stuff here. https://www.satelliteguys.us/xen/statistiche/ Although some of the stats are only seen on admin accounts) It is bots and cyber attacks on the site. We had a large amount of traffic coming from China, Russia, Vietnam an other places which I blocked on our firewall, which greatly reduced the guest traffic to the site.
However after a few days the traffic started going up again and looking at things it is traffic from other countries. I can keep blocking them, but the more we block the slower the site gets as the firewall needs to process more to check the traffic for allowed and not allowed.
So I started working with our forum software vendor who tell me that a majority of our traffic is bots... and most of these bots from from foreign countries.
They tell me I should block the bots from a robots.txt file on the server and that should get rid of most of them. I asked them how do I know which bots to block and they had me install a bot addon that is a service that detects and keeps a list of all bots. I am supposed to be able to go to Current visitors and see a list of them to which I can add ones I feel are not legit to the rebots.txt file. The only problem is if I go to Current visitors it tells me "No Results Found" the does the same for Guests Current visitors so I put in another ticket with them.
Anyways about 3 weeks ago they put out a new version of the software which fixes many... many bugs (You can see a list of fixes at XenForo 2.3.8 & Add-ons Released) and before they will help me with the robots and guest not showing in the Who's Online list I need when I upgrade to the latest version.
So for a few minutes I will be closing the site and doing this upgrade. The site will be down only for a few minutes.
And for those wondering... Yes TVGUYS.US is coming... just not today.
So we will be back in a few moments.
Over the past few weeks I have been working on an issue that has been bugging me. If you look at the amount of people online it shows there are thousands online at any time. I have tried figuring out why this user count is so high. And I installed a new program a few weeks ago which gave me some better insight. (You can see some of these stuff here. https://www.satelliteguys.us/xen/statistiche/ Although some of the stats are only seen on admin accounts) It is bots and cyber attacks on the site. We had a large amount of traffic coming from China, Russia, Vietnam an other places which I blocked on our firewall, which greatly reduced the guest traffic to the site.
However after a few days the traffic started going up again and looking at things it is traffic from other countries. I can keep blocking them, but the more we block the slower the site gets as the firewall needs to process more to check the traffic for allowed and not allowed.
So I started working with our forum software vendor who tell me that a majority of our traffic is bots... and most of these bots from from foreign countries.
They tell me I should block the bots from a robots.txt file on the server and that should get rid of most of them. I asked them how do I know which bots to block and they had me install a bot addon that is a service that detects and keeps a list of all bots. I am supposed to be able to go to Current visitors and see a list of them to which I can add ones I feel are not legit to the rebots.txt file. The only problem is if I go to Current visitors it tells me "No Results Found" the does the same for Guests Current visitors so I put in another ticket with them.
Anyways about 3 weeks ago they put out a new version of the software which fixes many... many bugs (You can see a list of fixes at XenForo 2.3.8 & Add-ons Released) and before they will help me with the robots and guest not showing in the Who's Online list I need when I upgrade to the latest version.
So for a few minutes I will be closing the site and doing this upgrade. The site will be down only for a few minutes.
And for those wondering... Yes TVGUYS.US is coming... just not today.
So we will be back in a few moments.
