MyBB Community Forums

Ok I'm running a forum for a year and a half now and its a small community of around 300 members getting a member every two days in average.

The number of the most users online at one time was really small for a long time, but in the last couple of days I have a tremendous increase of this number, like +300%.

The interesting thing is that google analytics dont show anything unusual, I have steady 200 +\- visits a day even in those days when this huge increase occurred.

Is there anyone who could explain what is going on here?

Thanks

How big is that number exactly? Anything below 30 could be the result of spammers trying to get on your website or some basic speed test tool.

Well, for almost 14 months it was 40 users at one time and now all of a sudden is 130. And it's increasing every day. This happens in really weird hours very early in the morning around 5.00

You should be able to check the source of the traffic from the traffic logs (if you have cPanel installed). The fact that google analytics is not tracking it might mean that it is bot traffic (which won't execute javascript), it could be someone with a small botnet trying to mess with you, no need to worry about it as long as it isn't constant traffic.

When you say 'trying to mess with you' what exactly could that mean? Should I be worried and is there anything I can do to prevent whatever they want to do? Thanks

You could start using cloudflare however I wouldn't be worried at this point. Check the traffic stats in cpanel (that is able to track bot traffic as well) and see whenever the traffic comes from another website or it is direct traffic.

By trying to mess with you I mean a very small scale DDoS attack. But since this isn't constant traffic it could be just a load test tool.

Later edit: You can compare those IPs to this list ( http://lists.blocklist.de/lists/all.txt )