Hi Everyone,
As per title, I have been experiencing a huge spike in traffic (+/- 20 000 per day) on my forum lately, which has caused the site to crash on a few occasions.
Link to forum (see the stats at the bottom of the page)
I have added some code to the .htaccess file, which seemed to help the site to be able to load at least, but it is still very sluggish and the visits distort my visitors stats. The code I have used was taken off someones help article, and the URLs do not necessarily match the ones that are spamming my site. I have been trying to figure out where to find the URLs/IP addresses that are causing the traffic so that I may include them in the .htaccess file, but being a noob, I don't seem to be able to get the info I need. Could anyone point me in the right direction? I would greatly appreciate any help!
Thanks
Nadja
(2015-04-27, 07:31 AM)Bushbaby77 Wrote: [ -> ]Hi Everyone,
As per title, I have been experiencing a huge spike in traffic (+/- 20 000 per day) on my forum lately, which has caused the site to crash on a few occasions. Link to forum (see the stats at the bottom of the page)
I have added some code to the .htaccess file, which seemed to help the site to be able to load at least, but it is still very sluggish and the visits distort my visitors stats. The code I have used was taken off someones help article, and the URLs do not necessarily match the ones that are spamming my site. I have been trying to figure out where to find the URLs/IP addresses that are causing the traffic so that I may include them in the .htaccess file, but being a noob, I don't seem to be able to get the info I need. Could anyone point me in the right direction? I would greatly appreciate any help!
Thanks
Nadja
probably spammers or bots.
I recently created a new thread on a forum that's still being developed that simply said video disclaimer...it already has over 1K views in a day, and there's only 6 users on the forum!
Yes, crazy how they (spammers) latch onto anything and everything! I have a spam user problem on my website as well despite captcha and bot control plugins!! Argghh!!
It is really becoming a problem now as I can't even access the forum at times. I would like to try and block the URLs that are causing this from reaching the site. Is there a way to find out where the traffic is coming from? I am afraid that the forum becomes unusable if this continues.
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Please could someone at least give me a pointer? The visits have now increased up to almost 100 000 per day and I have thousands of views on each thread! The forum is impossible to browse at times.
I have installed google analytics, but I don't know how to get it to record traffic from robots to record the URL.
How do I stop this?? Any help appreciated.
Hi,
You'll need to check your access logs to see if there are any common IPs causing a lot of traffic. Depending on your host, these logs may be accessible via the hosting control panel. These details should also be available via Google Analytics, though I cannot remember the exact section they're shown within.
Hi, and thanks for replying to my post, it's really appreciated!
I am using cpanel with godaddy. The forum is a subdomain to my website and I am still fairly new with this so apologies if the questions are strange. What would this file be called? I guess, I would find this in the forums dubdomain folder in the root? My stats & usage in cpanel state that I am almost out of resources, apparently I am using a great deal of RAM. Would this be because of the huge traffic volume?
Google analytics does only pic up the 20-30 or so 'genuine' visits to my forum, despite me having set up a URL filter and set it to count the bots. (Talking out of my knowledge zone here) I have read on some website that this is because those bots do not trigger a java script and therefore go undetected by google analytics. Pulling my hair out!!
Hi,
According to the cPanel documentation, you should be able to get the access logs here:
https://documentation.cpanel.net/display...ccess+Logs
You'll likely get a .zip file or a large single file which shows all of the requests made to your site. You'll need to try and filter through it for any recurring patterns that don't seem right.
And yes, many bots do not execute JavaScript and therefore will not show up in Analytics. They should still be displayed in your access logs though
Thanks so much for your help! I found the raw log files, but when I extracted the .gz file, it became a dos file?? I kind of expected the files to be a .txt?
I was however able to view visitors' IP addresses in other parts of the the statistics. I will try to block the one with the most hits for now to see if it makes a difference. I still would like to be able to view my raw log file though Have I made a mistake somewhere? So much to learn!
Hi,
That's weird, it should just be a text file, but it might not have a file extension. If you right click on it, can you open the file in notepad and see if it's readable?
Yes, that seems weird.. I have included a screen shot of what the file looks like after downloading it in .gz format, and what format it is in after extracting it with 7 zip.
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