Members on line, vs Guests on line...

dirknerkle

dirknerkle

Supporting Member
As I type this there are 5 members and 472 guests on line. If you find that performance starts taking a hit, you might check the IP addresses of the guests. My guess is that at least half of them are bots that are coming from overseas. And if you check your PHP log files, I'll bet that several of them are attempts to break into the forum. It's not too hard to lock-out huge blocks of those IP addresses by range at the system level.
 
I've noticed that Google searching for particular threads is having an issue.
E.g. site:doityourselfchristmas.com "Bullet pixel" shows many results, but clicking a link from Google opens an invalid link to the new forum, which then redirects to the forums home page. I can imagine many search engines (& other random bots) are needing to index the entire site again.
 
Yes, that is a known issue. The redirects are not working properly so any old urls are temporarily sent to the home page instead of a 404 error. I have not been able to find the solution yet.
 
If you use an Apache server, one way is to use an .htaccess file on the web server's root, which works with PHP to allow/block access. My file had more than 400 entries, but it eliminated a lot of rifraf from China, Taiwan, Japan, Germany, France and Spain. Eventually I had to add IP ranges to cover some South American countries, too. I'd update it weekly, simply by looking at the "who's online" list, highlight the IP address of a guest, copy it into the clipboard and then use an iplookup service to find out what country the IP address was coming from. I didn't block everything, but after a few weeks, the file had grown in size to quite a large list but it cut most of the bots and web crawlers out that way as the web server rejected their IP's, so they never even got to the forum. I didn't bother with redirects -- I just blocked them. Using .htaccess may not be the best way, but it worked for me, and the effects were instant.

Here's an easy-to-understand article on it:
How to use .htaccess
 
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