Re: HELP: How To Stop Bots Hitting My Forum
Reply #1 –
Well, page views are affected by any visit, so it's no wonder bots are included (and before you ask, there is not really a safe way to avoid that apart from using external tools for activity tracking).
Who is online (as already explained in other topics, even though I wouldn't remember which one they are, so I'll explain here again) doesn't really show what "someone" (or something) is viewing, but what URL he/it is trying to access, so even if the topic is topic is gone, you may still see someone trying to open it (if there is a link somewhere, or if, like in this case, a bot it hitting always the same URL).
If you really want to stop this page from appearing, you can add an entry in your htaccess to deny access to that particular topic, you take some example from the internet, like:
https://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/77168/how-can-i-use-htaccess-to-respond-with-403-forbidden-status-for-urls-that-conta
and put together something like that.
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^.*topic=TOPIC_ID.*$ - [R=403,NC,L]
where you replace "TOPIC_ID" with the actual id of the topic.
ETA: BTW, if you are gonna stay behind each and every bot on the internet that decides to hammer a single URL of your website, you'll likely have to stay awake 24/24 and 7/7.
I'd say start worrying when the site goes down because of a DDOS, not before.