Thanks a lot Simon :up: ... I still have same problem with Baidu :( ... I have checked my raw access log today and still having loads of Baidu spiders in my site 48 hours after installing the mod :eek: ... this is how they appear in my log file:

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Baiduspider/2.0; +http://www.baidu.com/search/spider.html)

Any recommendations?

Regarding Alexa, I have certified my site and have pasted their javascript code in the header of my forum as they recommend so they can analyse my website traffic directly regardless of visitors with/without alexa toolbar ... I don't know if my alexa rank will drop due to drop in the overall visitor numbers after banning spiders?

Regards

of course your raw logs from cpanel, plesk or whathaveyou will show them visiting your site, remember this mod redirects them when trying to load your site, it does that regardless of whether they are trying to load the homepage or a thread, your Alexa shouldn't drop on account of redirecting spiders, in fact i've been redirecting these spiders for ages on one of my sites that was Page Rank 2 and it's now PR3, so if it's not hurting Google rank it has to be good :)

Can you give me a screenshot of your settings for ths mod?

Midohash, if you want to pm me admin access i'll take a look.

Excellent mod, thank you.

What is the advantage/disadvantage to redirecting spiders back to their own IP?

You have to send them somewhere and whilst the example i gave you is a fun place to send them and they expect a certain amount of bots there's no guarantees that it will always be there, however, if you redirect to their own IP they will always have somewhere to be redirected to :)

to block spiders are benificial or not ?

Blocking spiders will save you tons on your bandwidth and server load, take the Baiduspider they send hundreds upon hindreds of bots to index your site and they don't obey robots.txt

working on vbulletin 4.1.10

The ips for baidu I also ban: 123, 124 125 and 58