[Forum] Spam and Guest IP

[Kat-2]

I am having a terrible time with spam, and guest IP's.

Guest IP first. Why is it that my members will be online, and also showing as a Guest?
Does the same for me. I am on the forum, yet my IP shows as a Guest as well.

As for the Spam, it has been so bad until my host has suspended me 2 times so far.
They say I am pulling too much cpu resources. Odd. I am not sure I am buying it, but bottom line is they do suspend me.
The first time they did, I removed everything off my domain except the one vb forum I have.
The said it should be fine.
This last time they suspended me, they again were saying I was pulling too much cpu resources. Too many hits from bots. I put in the robot.txt and have stayed up a few days so far, but now every time I see all the bots, I am freaking for fear of being suspended again.
I have been with this host for several years now, and never had this problem, even with running a few SMF forums at once.

Does vb pull that much more cpu resources? Understand that this vb forum is new..only about 3 weeks old, has about 125 members, with around 100 active, but only maybe 50 posting daily.
I don't get it. My domain renewal is up soon, and I am trying to decide if I need to find a new host.

[digitalpoint]

What type of hosting/plan do you have? I mean if you have some sort of $10/month shared hosting, it's probably not going to be enough for any site that actually gets traffic.

[tChristine]

Hi Kat,

I'm sure someone will chime in here with some better answers than myself, but....

Guests - It's the same for me.

I think it shows that way, because the member is a Guest until they login. So, it will first show "Guest" .. and after they login .. the member name. The IP seems to be persistent for both, even after they're logged in. I think you can change it by editing "Users active in the past X minutes."

As for CPU usage. Do you know what your limits are in your TOS?

Like, I have a little over 20,000 posts, 2000 members, and about 400 who are 'very active'..

I've never had a warning (fingers crossed), but I have to say within a limit.

Memory: 8 Gb through 100Mbp channel. And, I must stay under 10% of those resources on the server. Have they been very specific about 'what' percent of 'what' total resources you need to abide by?

[Kat-2]

Hi Kat,

I'm sure someone will chime in here with some better answers than myself, but....

Guests - It's the same for me.

I think it shows that way, because the member is a Guest until they login. So, it will first show "Guest" .. and after they login .. the member name. The IP seems to be persistent for both, even after they're logged in. I think you can change it by editing "Users active in the past X minutes."

As for CPU usage. Do you know what your limits are in your TOS?

Like, I have a little over 20,000 posts, 2000 members, and about 400 who are 'very active'..

I've never had a warning (fingers crossed), but I have to say within a limit.

Memory: 8 Gb through 100Mbp channel. And, I must stay under 10% of those resources on the server. Have they been very specific about 'what' percent of 'what' total resources you need to abide by?

I started the forum in the middle of January of this year. Started invited people later than that. Imported it from SMF to vB 3 weeks ago. I have around 34,000 posts...averaging between 700 - 900 posts a day.

I don't know what my usage is. What is the difference in bandwidth and cpu usage?

I have had this host for several years...and have had busy forums...all SMF, but no, haven't that an average of that many posts per day.

Never have been suspended before now either.

I don't get why 1 forum which is not huge by any means, is now causing these problems.

[Zachery]

The data in the sessions table shouldn't cause any serious issues, its a few extra bytes.

[Kat-2]

Then I don't get why I am being suspended, though they seem to think it is bots/spam causing my issue.
And btw I have not had one bot to register thus far.

Also my forum is private.

[Zachery]

If bots/guests are hammering the forum, it could be causing incrased bw and script usage.
Ask them why they think its bots/spammers?

[Kat-2]

If bots/guests are hammering the forum, it could be causing incrased bw and script usage.
Ask them why they think its bots/spammers?

They already told me there were seeing the hits. Seeing pages being pulled by bots. Said (last time I spoke with them - Friday evening), I had 19 of them within a half hour pulling pages.
If that is true, then they must have been invisible, b/c I never saw that many.....but the immediately suspended me......though I did see 9 at one time last night.

[Zachery]

Hits of what? Who is your webhost?
Seems pretty odd to suspend your site over 17 "heavy" users.

[Kat-2]

inmotion and I have used them for several years...no problems.

[digitalpoint]

Uh... if they are seeing 19 in a 30 minute window and they can't handle that, you definitely need to think about switching hosts. Not sure if they are talking about unique users or page hits, but we average about 31,000 page requests from bots in a 30 minute window (about half of which are just Googlebot).

If the bots you are seeing adhere properly to robots.txt directives, you can slow them down if you want.

User-agent: *
Crawl-delay: 10

That would tell spiders to not request more than 1 page every 10 seconds.

[Kat-2]

They already had me put in a file named robots.txt with

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Can I put this one in as well? (meaning have both files in at same time)

[digitalpoint]

Well the robots.txt file they had you put makes it so no search engine will spider your site (you will never be in Google search results) for example. It's simply telling all spiders to never spider anything.

If your host told you to put that there, even more reason to find a new host. I bet they don't have that in their own robots.txt file.

[Kat-2]

Well the robots.txt file they had you put makes it so no search engine will spider your site (you will never be in Google search results) for example. It's simply telling all spiders to never spider anything.

If your host told you to put that there, even more reason to find a new host. I bet they don't have that in their own robots.txt file.

It doesn't stop them though. I guess I have ''bad bots''. LOL
Mine are mostly from Japan, and one was Vietnam. Others Microtrend.
I keep getting this one IP from Japan that I have banned. Did no good to ban either. Same IP comes back.

Paranoia sets in hunting a new host...I don't mind paying more (and no I did not have the cheapest inmotion offered..but it is years old, and I have to wonder if they want me gone b/c I pay less for the same people pay more for now days), but don't want to pay a fortune. Most of all I want dependability.

[Zachery]

It takes time for the bots to re-cache robots.txt, even then not all spiders will follow the robots.txt file.