Insane number of guests
 

Hi.

I've had an insane number of guests on my forum for a while now and I've decided to investigate this further. I know that they are not normal guests. I originally thought they may be spiders but they are not. Any idea what they could be and how to get rid of them to get a more accurate number? Here's what it's currently saying

Currently Active Users
There are currently 1972 users online. 14 members and 1937 guests and 21 spiders

Thanks

prob just bots looking for a way in.

Any idea/mod to get rid of them? Number like that one makes us look fake and inauthentic.

--------------- Added [DATE]1297226317[/DATE] at [TIME]1297226317[/TIME] ---------------

Anyone?

Can you view their IP address? If you can then you can block their IP address using IP tables or cPanel IP Banning.

Thanks, but it's almost impossible to ban 2000+ bots one by one. I probably need to ban IPs from countries like Germany, Russia, France and Czech Republic. These four countries alone suck 1GB of bandwidth/month and I don't even have any genuine members from those countries. I also think it's highly unlikely that I will ever have a member from those countries.

Is your spiders listing up to date?

I think so. Here's my robots.txt: http://indianwatchdogs.com/robots.txt

No, the spiders list.

forums/includes/xml/spiders_vbulletin.xml

We've been seeing these "Guest attacks" lately too. 10X the normal number at random times of the day, all doing different things, and all from different IPs. Very odd.

I noticed early on my cpanel Referrers had 10X referrals from mikle.com (Feedwind) (about 3000 compared to FB's 300). Not sure if it's relevant but I removed my Feedwind forum blocks this morning.