Lots of spammers and bots lately

[JimD]

I was just looking through the log of new Xweb users and one thing stood out. We have had about 280 "users" register since Feb 1st, 2024. Out of those approximately 280 registrations, only about 15 registrations have been deemed legitimate and resulted in a new registered user. The rest end up in the "rejected" category.

While I find this rate of "fake" users a little surprising for a small site like Xweb, I do see this as a good indicator that @MarkF and the Xenforo registration software are doing a good job of filtering out the potential bad actors before they get into the forum.

 

[Rod Midkiff]

Thank you for keeping the forums as troll-free as you can!!

 

[86X]

I’m seeing the same thing on a forum I am a moderator on, it is small also.

 

[Russe11]

Perhaps the extra traffic from the "bots" is responsible for the sporadic slowness that we've experienced. There are a handful of registered users and nearly 700 'guests' on the forum at the moment...

 

[JimD]

Perhaps the extra traffic from the "bots" is responsible for the sporadic slowness that we've experienced. There are a handful of registered users and nearly 700 'guests' on the forum at the moment...

It is hard to know what is going on with the "Guests". Currently, the bulk of the 600+ guests are all from related IPs in Malaysia and China. Probably all gathering content for search engines or similar activity as they all show a status of "Viewing latest content" or "Viewing thread .....". They could be slowing things down I suppose, but response seem good today.

 

[Rod Midkiff]

I was talking up about how well things were working,, Yesterday, I could not get on xweb at all.

And, of course, it had to happen just after Xfinity upgraded my modem. so I was wondering if it was the modem or xweb.

 

[MarkF]

It is hard to know what is going on with the "Guests". Currently, the bulk of the 600+ guests are all from related IPs in Malaysia and China. Probably all gathering content for search engines or similar activity as they all show a status of "Viewing latest content" or "Viewing thread .....". They could be slowing things down I suppose, but response seem good today.

This seems to be happening on a lot of sites. Legitimate crawler bots will identify themselves as such through their user agent string but these aren't. I've taken steps aimed at the the worst offenders, and that seems to have lightened the user count somewhat. Perhaps that wil mitigate the load, which might be respopnsible for recent forum latency. It's going to be a game of whack-a-mole though.