78 guest viewing my forum?
Every once and a while, when I visit my forum, I will see a large number of "guests" viewing the site. under forum stats. Today its 36, a few days ago, it was 78. This is a newly built forum that I know is not THAT popular! I assume they are 90% spam bots trying to get in?
I did have a Vanilla forum at the site, but replaced it with Elk. Vanilla was allowing 3 or 4 spam bots in a day, although they weren't able to post. And that was using Googles captcha! How are they bypassing captcha and still getting in? Are the ones that got in actual spammers? That's all I can figure.
Anyway, I have not had one spam bot get through Elk I'm happy to report, and I'm only using a simple "What is 19-5=" question.
Re: 78 guest viewing my forum?
Reply #1 –
Most likely just search bots that are trying to index your site.
A guest is any IP address that is viewing the site but not logged in as a user. Sure some of that could be spam bots but from my experience its mostly search bots (real and BS ones) and the like.
Also I think the number is related to an admin setting of logged in time minimum (sorry don't remember the text right now) ... but basically if an IP hits the site its "active" for the period of time set in the ACP even when they are no longer active on the site, so a bot could hit the site for 5 seconds and appear as active in the count for that value set in the ACP (I think it defaults to 15 mins)
Re: 78 guest viewing my forum?
Reply #8 –
No risk .. we use the Browser HTTP_USER_AGENT for the detection ..
Re: 78 guest viewing my forum?
Reply #10 –
Right now I see: 8 members logged in, 98 guests and 8 spiders on my forum (in the last 15 min). I checked the resource usage and all seems normal, the CPU usage is less than 10-15 %, Ram under 500MB. I guess every shared host can handle this without problems.
Re: 78 guest viewing my forum?
Reply #12 –
When I mentioned "how are they getting past Googles Captcha, that was on the Vanilla forum that I replaced with Elk, on the same domain by the way.
Somehow, I was getting 3 or so "signups" a day, and that's with using Captcha. I don't know how they got past Captcha, unless they were real people spamming the forum. The only way these bots or spammers were being stopped from posting, was when I clicked on the "please confirm your email address" option. I had a lot of "Unconfirmed members", listed then.
So, since Elk is on the same domain, I think it's doing a better job of rejecting the spam that was plaguing Vanilla, by just showing a guest count. That's my theory anyway.
I'm going to do like Ahrasis is doing, leave the forum set the way it is. Like Radu81, I don't notice any load either on my server.
Re: 78 guest viewing my forum?
Reply #14 –
Interesting Emanuele. I did not know that about Captcha having a weakness. I learn something new every day.
I guess the old "12-7=" challenge question is more reliable? Who would have thunk it.... I wonder why websites still use Captcha? Just curious.