Now online: 58 members and 87(!) guests?

Bearded but no genius

Full Member
Joined
Jul 1, 2004
Messages
67,679
I thought that you guys had found a way to block webbots and such.

There are 87 of them online right now, half again as many as there are actual members on.

Is there any other or better way to block them? I can't imagine they're doing anything beneficial in their sneaking around.
 
WeasteDevil said:
Turn off the guest feature? :wenger:
We have, for some reason the crawlers can still get round it though. We banned the IP ranges of some of the more prevalent ones like inktomisearch (Google) but banning ranges has caused problems with the odd user in the past so we can't do much more.
 
How can they get around it?

If you needed to log on to see the forums, ie. you needed to return a cookie from valid a PHP session after logging on, nothing should be able to see them without a log on name.

Last time I came on without logging on, I think that you could see the general. Not too sure. Wait a mo!
 
WeasteDevil said:
How can they get around it?

If you needed to log on to see the forums, ie. you needed to return a cookie from valid a PHP session after logging on, nothing should be able to see them without a log on name.

Last time I came on without logging on, I think that you could see the general. Not too sure. Wait a mo!

All guests might love watching the general though.
 
There are links that a bot could follow to General Discussion and Miscellaneous, but you cannot view any threads.

Are these guests viewing threads?

Wait a mo!
 
Stupid fecking forum software is taking people as a guest if they are only just viewing the front page without being logged on.

Potty!
 
That was the thing with the old UBB software, you couldn't even see anything without going through a logon page first.
 
Something has to be done. It's impossible to logon after a game.
 
But a lot of that is actual users, rather than nasty computers.

There's a big difference from the way a forum is going to function with 50 users intermittently throwing shit onto the forums (like right now, in the dead of night) and 300 users, all trying to post their own twist on "SackFergieSellGiggs" or "Ronaldo is the greatest footballer in the world".

The guest problem seems to be a totally different problem from the post-match one.
 
jasonrh said:
But a lot of that is actual users, rather than nasty computers.

There's a big difference from the way a forum is going to function with 50 users intermittently throwing shit onto the forums (like right now, in the dead of night) and 300 users, all trying to post their own twist on "SackFergieSellGiggs" or "Ronaldo is the greatest footballer in the world".

The guest problem seems to be a totally different problem from the post-match one.

Still it's a lot of guests after a game just to watch everyone say sack Fergie,sell Giggs.
 
WeasteDevil said:
There are links that a bot could follow to General Discussion and Miscellaneous, but you cannot view any threads.

Are these guests viewing threads?

Wait a mo!

Yes, they're viewing threads and generally following all links until they hit a dead end. At the moment of the 20 on, we have 5 viewing user profiles, 4 in threads, 2 reporting threads and the rest just looking at the index page.

I can only assume that the bulletin board software has a skeleton key fitted which allows the crawlers in.

As for doing something, there's not much more we can do, we also struggle to get in after games. We are moving to a brand new fast, sleek and shiny server in 2-3 weeks though so that should improve things.
 
There must be a hole in the security of the software then. Interesting.
 
WeasteDevil said:
There must be a hole in the security of the software then. Interesting.
I suspect it is a deliberate route in provided to the major search engines as it would increase Jelsoft's internet rating. Oh shit, have I just given Weastie the inspiration to try and hack the site and award himself a banning stick :nervous:
 
Shit, never thought of that!

Doh!

Hmmmmmmmmmmm........ wait a mo..... ;)