Getting lots of visitors

tunedTECH · Share | #1 (**permalink**) 12-29-2011, 01:23 PM

I've been checking my who's online on my forum board and i've noticed that there's a lot of guest online (500+)

Was wondering if these guest are all search engine or real people?

I know when you click to the Ip address it will tell you if its a bot like google, yahoo and bing. but some ip's doesn't say anything.

**snakeair** · #2 (**permalink**) 12-29-2011, 05:14 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by tunedTECH

I've been checking my who's online on my forum board and i've noticed that there's a lot of guest online (500+)

Was wondering if these guest are all search engine or real people?

I know when you click to the Ip address it will tell you if its a bot like google, yahoo and bing. but some ip's doesn't say anything.

Some are search engine bot's and some are just bot's that are trying to register to spam your forum. (Some are even just real guests)

Have you looked up one of the IP address's online?

Meerkat · #3 (**permalink**) 12-30-2011, 06:12 PM

Quite a few could just be rogue bots which ignore any robots.txt file and just crawl everything and anything. What you could do is add a crawl-delay to the file, that will at least keep the legitimate bots at bay, then after that try Googling some of the IP's which are still floating around to find out what they are then take action accordingly.

simplyamazing12 · #4 (**permalink**) 01-05-2012, 10:37 PM

I ran into similar issues with my VBulletin board last year around June. It was consistently 300-400 guests and a lot of bots/spam bots spammed my boards.

To counter it, I just set registration to required and made it so I had to approve of the new members.

Pawpoint · #5 (**permalink**) 01-06-2012, 01:59 AM

Thats the only way to do it. Set Registration. I think its fine for people to post links in signatures as it encourages response to the articles/blogs. But spamming for no reason has to be stopped

Searchable · #6 (**permalink**) 01-10-2012, 06:51 PM

You can also set limited guest viewing and maybe a few human verification questions on registration and both should fix any issue if you ever did have any spam and also give you more members with the limited guest viewing plugin.

JackDany · #7 (**permalink**) 03-29-2012, 04:42 PM

If you are using vBulletin forum board, add a plugin that will make users automatically deleted if they are not verified after let's say 48hours, I was running a forum before, I had more than 1000 user a day, 95% of them were bots and spam bots, registering with spammy accounts and post automatic products advertisments, till I used a very limited system of posting content and verification processes!