Shed Some Light For Me?

[Dr_BuzzCzar]

I've noticed over the last few months that typically about 1/2 of our "Guests" that are online at any given point in time are from IP 180.76.5.xxx This is from China. I assume (maybe rightly, maybe wrongly) that this is somehow connected to spam efforts. I've asked a couple of pretty web-savvy guys to explain to me what could be accomplished by just staying online in a forum. They could not help me. Anyone know what this group would be doing? Inquiring minds need to know!

[Emma]

I dont know but I do also, like yourself, have an inquiring mind.

[js207]

It is indeed China - the answer is in fact the obvious one: the 'guests' are reading all the web pages they can get to. They aren't real people, they're the indexing 'spiders' behind the Chinese Baidu search engine, which is why they'll never register, log in or post comments: all they do is visit all the pages they can, to update their index.

[Dr_BuzzCzar]

Thanks, when I had first researched those IP's I found they were connected to Baidu but they weren't on the web crawler list of IP's (agent string, I think my guy said? I'm woefully ignorant of this technology.) but now they show up.

Just out of pure curiosity I checked all the IP's that were on as guests at a single point last night. Total 47; 23 from Baidu, 2 from Google, 1 from Microsoft, 1 unknown from from Australia, 20 were from IP's that were already banned, mostly from Eastern Europe.

Sometimes I wish I weren't so damn curious. I have information but little knowledge to accompany it. I'll let it go and get back to zapping spammers.

[js207]

I'll let it go and get back to zapping spammers.

A never-ending task, sadly ... I've put blocks in place on a couple of big webhosting companies which were being used for spam (obviously, the only way a web server would be posting on here is if it's being abused for spam!) which seems to have helped a bit. The trouble is, these spammers tend to get control of a machine then use it to blast out tens of thousands of forum posts on all the forums they know about. A couple of times, I've had a notification of a new user registration and seen their IP already listed as an active mass-forum-spammer even before they posted here, which is nice to catch...

[Emma]

I just wanted to say thank you guys for all of the incredible god like spam control.  I get the reports but i never see them fast enough to get to delete them these days.  Thank you bunches.  Its sort of crazy at my home for now and this is one stress off.   I look forward to normal days again.

xxoo