Bots are devouring my monthly execution limit/bandwidth. Love some help
 

https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/external/2013/11/11.png

I'm massively unaware of what to do, and my site's monthly execution limit has been bumped twice in the last 3 days to get the forum back online.

Needless to say, I'm clueless as to what I should do to stop this from happening.

Any help or suggestions (perhaps a portion of assistance) would be rad.

Thanks, everyone.:confused:

I would be willing to bet, most of them are unwanted spiders, try this mod, https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=268208

Thanks, ozzy. You're a gem.

Hopefully it works! Any advice if it doesn't? I seem to constantly have at least 3 bot IPs registering at once. Annoying!

Stick this in your .htaccess file:

Had a similar problem myself a couple of months back.

Part2 in a mo

Last one, and you should be good :D

May you be soaked in pheromones and thrown in to a supermodel shoot.

obglobal.net, let me know if that works for you, having a similar problem

This will stop most of the spam bots that auto-register:

https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=294633

This stops registration by any device on blacklisted host names: (You compile the list. I have a good one I will give you via PM. This is effective against both human spammers and auto bot spammers)

https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthread.php?t=279110


NONE of the above use captchas, puzzles, questions or other such nonsense that merely annoys legitimate users, and have been rendered obsolete anyway for the most part, by autospam programs such as XRumer.

The era of Big Spam is over.

The mod from the post below seems to be working well so far.

I had bots auto registering like mad before, at least 5 at a time. All of a sudden my "Who's Online" has none whatsoever.

I didn't get around to doing the aforementioned one. Have a few queries about it.

I'll see if this mod pans out.

--------------- Added [DATE]1385649487[/DATE] at [TIME]1385649487[/TIME] ---------------

TYVM. Appreciated. :up:

I am using the MOD Ozzy suggested and works really well.

I noticed also some spammers are constantly trying to register or even login without being registered.
Therefore I added a couple countries to my blacklist in the htcacess file.
If you need the IP's from certain countries try this page: http://incredibill.me/htaccess-block-country-ips

I'm still getting bombarded with bot registrations.

A lot of these: v39.server16.vpn999.com

Any ideas?

Block the ip or hostname, though I wouldn't block bing personally.

Try using this.
https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showthrea...ghlight=spider

:D

https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showpost....91&postcount=2

I've installed every mod and edited my htaccess to exclude particular countries.

I'm still getting ravaged by bot registrations:

https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/external/2013/11/2.png

Any guru ideas, gentlemen?

Increase timer setting to 25 seconds.

The "Block Registrations by Hostname" Mod is only so good as the list you have for it, same story with "Ban Spiders by User Agent.

I recently stopped hundreds of bots a day from registering on a vB4 that was being ravaged. Now, nothing spammy gets through at all. You can PM me for my user agent and hostname ban lists.

On to it right now!

We have stopped 100% here by using these free tools:

• Spambot Stopper (times how long they take in reg screen)
• Q&A a random question and answer from a pool of 5
• Spam-O-Matic

They get executed in the order above. If its a bot (fast, spambot stopper does the job, by counting number of seconds it takes them to fill out the registration screen), if its slow, and can answer the random question, the IP and EMAIL addresses are checked by Spam-o-matic by the blacklist database at www.stopforumspam.com (Just make sure you have the NICKNAME CHECKING turned off in that app, or it will get a lot of false positives)

If they pass all 3, then they are allowed to create a new account on the forum.

Mike

PS: We also use vb bad behavior

Awesomeness. Thanks, Mike. Good dude.

Also, big thanks to Max Taxable for his help, aong, of course, with everyone else. vb.org rocks!

Hello, vb.org! A Merry Xmas to you all.

So my site is still getting pillaged by bots after trying everything. These bots are a-holes!

These 2 in particular are having their way with my site, and I cannot manage to block them.

Unknown robot (identified by empty user agent string)
Unknown robot (identified by 'bot*')

Could anyone please help me regarding .htaccess? I'd appreciate the input because I suck at this stuff.

Thanks a lot.

Hello one idea that I have for you is to use cloudflare. From there you can easily block bots, also, cloudflare is capable of serving many static resources from you to help you save your servers resources. However I believe that it will only serve the static resources once you get a paid plan ($5 or more), the user agent/bad behaviour thing is available on the free plan.

I'll also leave you with these 2 links to check out to do further research.
http://www.fleiner.com/bots/

https://www.google.com/search?q=slow...sm=93&ie=UTF-8

I used Cloud Flare for two years. It is not worth the downtime it causes and if your host goes down, you still go down. it doesn't do anything, really except put your site on a proxy.

Obglobal - please define "pillaged."

Pillaged as in getting invaded by. Bots are invading my site.

So Cloud Flare is no go, hey. I can't believe it's so tricky to get rid of bots!

Thanks for helping.

--------------- Added [DATE]1387670459[/DATE] at [TIME]1387670459[/TIME] ---------------

Thanks a lot man!!! I'll be sure to check that out.

How many? 10s, 100s, 1000s? What are they actually doing?It's not.

Tens of thousands over a month's time. They're doing basically everything they can to sweep the site, including 200+ registrations per day.

I've added mods to stop them from registering, but it still racks up on my monthly executions limit.

--------------- Added [DATE]1387670759[/DATE] at [TIME]1387670759[/TIME] ---------------

Sorry, I meant tens of thousands of executions. Not tens of thousands of bots.

To help further I would need access to see this for myself and check some things out in the backend.

However testing your site shows you have bigger problems than bots - bandwidth usage just for pageload is off the scale and that is not bots causing that:

http://www.webpagetest.org/result/13..._8R/1/details/

LATER EDIT: C'mon Man, you don't have a bot problem at all. Never did have. Here's stats from your forum home page:

Currently Active Users

There are currently 20 users online. 0 members and 20 guests

Most users ever online was 61, 05-23-2013 at 05:06 PM.

That's nothing.

Yeah, the load time is pretty enormous. I'm happy to give you access, but would you mind holding off for a while? My second son's just been born, I'm travelling overseas for Xmas, and I have a pretty nasty hangover. Haha.

I also have the admincp ip denial mod active, but don't have access to my computer to turn it off at the moment.

I really appreciate your help dude.

You don't have a bot problem. Please disable the hook system in adminCP so i can test just your native vBulletin installation, to see how the host server behaves that way.

Your sidebar alone is doing about 100 executions every pageload and and about 100 calls to the db, THIS is what is using up your resources. You have way too much junk in it like Post thanks feed, tag cloud, activity stream. It's making the page about twice as long as your tables go.

Really? Thanks for having a look at it, Max Tax.

Ok I have disabled the sidebar completely for now, and also made sure the hooks were off. LOOK at the improvement in your page load:

BEFORE: http://www.webpagetest.org/result/13..._8R/1/details/

AFTER: http://www.webpagetest.org/result/13..._VG/1/details/


You have never, ever had a bot problem my friend, the problem is your site is way over modded. All the junk you're displaying in your sidebar is killing your allotments.



LATER EDIT: I disabled the sidebar anywhere Mod for guests, unregistered/not logged in usergroup. Guests don't really need it, and this will buy you some time to make changes to the composition of your sidebar.

Hooks are re-enabled globally.

Max Taxable, you are awesome. I had no idea.

Big props to Max Tax, everyone.

Man, this site is so good for me, Lord Of The Noob.

I appreciate all the assistance and advice I've received from the genius individuals here at vb.org.

I wish you all a Rad Xmas and a 2014 packed full of good karma.

Selflessness reigns supreme at vb.org.

Thank you.

Understand - for people who are logged in that sidebar is still going to be making 100s of calls to the db with each pageload. So the problem is not 100% solved. You need to decide how many of your pages that sidebar is going to display on, and what all is displayed in it. First things I would get rid of is the thanks bit and the tag cloud, and the activity stream. Make it minimalist is my suggestion.

Happy Christmas and a Merry New Year to you and yours too!