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Slammed by spambots and/or zombies

1 Jul 23, 2013 04:39    

I've been using B2evolution for about 3 years now and I really like it. I recently upgraded to 5.04 Stable. The blog is at http://www.giandosigurani.com/blog/blogs/

I'm getting absolutely creamed by traffic from zombies. Not robots, I don't think... but users from Windows XP who instantly bounce and who attempt to post comments but fail, because I use ReCaptcha and it works perfectly. There's not a traffic problem (my service allows infinite bandwidth), but it's drastically affecting my analytics. I used to have a clear picture of who reads my site and how many regular readers I have, etc, but now I have no idea. My top posts used to be the actual top posts with the most views by humans, now they're just whatever article happens to be at top and easily accessible by zombies.

I read in a few places that there's a way to block "referral" traffic. So instead of bots or zombies bouncing around endlessly at their heart's content, they can get stuck and are forced to reload the page. Or something. I'm not actually sure what I read or even if it's true. I also read something about updating the robots.txt file.

What I'd like to know is, is there anything I can do? Is there a way to stop this onslought? They're not really causing any harm but I'd really like them to stop affecting my numbers. And who knows; maybe I'd like to display ads some day. I hear advertisers wouldn't like to hear that their impressions are going to a bunch of spammers.

Is there anything I can do, or is this just a consequence of having a web page on the internet?

Thanks in advance.

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2 Jul 23, 2013 04:40

Scratch that! It looks like my reCaptcha stopped working. I will have to address that. But I would still like help fending off the zombie hoard!

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3 Jul 29, 2013 22:49

Does anyone has an answer for me? I've fixed my reCaptcha issue but I'm still getting plastered by zombies. Now every time I make a post it becomes my top post, and my analytics are drastically incorrect. Anyone have any ideas?

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4 Aug 02, 2013 22:17

have you disabled trackback?

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5 Aug 02, 2013 22:37

I have checked the advanced blog settings in blog>blog settings>advanced but I don't see a setting for trackbacks. Have they been moved?

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7 Aug 02, 2013 22:46

I just checked and it looks like trackbacks were unchecked.

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8 Aug 02, 2013 22:49

Have you looked at your apache access logs. Sometimes it's just one or 2 IPs that do all the harm. In that case you can block them.

How many hits per blog post per day are we talking about?

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9 Aug 02, 2013 23:08

I'm presuming the apache access logs are available from my hosting service's control panel, correct? I haven't taken a look. I really don't even know where to start here, sorry!
They appear to be completely diverse IPs at least according to my service provider. I was getting close to 6000 views a day on the "posts" page which lists the last ten posts or so, but it's since simmered down to about 1500 views a day. And each post gets several hundred views a day, seemingly at random; My last post, after a week, got 4500 views.

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10 Aug 02, 2013 23:15

Hum... that is annoying indeed.
I don't think there's much we can do on the b2evolution side. If they are diverse IPs, we can only view them as normal hits.

You might try to configure the GeoIP plugin and check if they all come from the same country (or ask your provider to check the IPs in your log).

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