[john2k]

Does anyone else notice the chatbox archive attracting a very large number of bots?

I'm not sure what causes it, but I often have thousands of bots viewing my chatbox archive. Yesterday it was more than 7,000 showing up in the 'currently active users' section, which I have set to the default vB timeout of 15 minutes. I don't even know if they are all bots to tell you the truth.

The IPs are all over the place, from many different networks, and are scattered all over the world. Some IPs are for actual websites... so I imagine either the website or their servers are connecting/scanning my chatbox archive for some odd reason. Other IPs appear to be for legitimate ISP customers and still others I did notice appear to be spiders (but most that I checked did were not spiders).

The suspect IPs do not appear to be loading javascript since my javascript stats tracker doesn't report them in the visitor totals. I figure this means that they are all bots/spiders of some sort that do not read/load javascript.

This isn't a new thing, either. It's been going on for quite some time. Yesterday it got to the point of slowing down my server due to the 7000+ bots (of whatever) that were concurrently connected based on the vB 900 second timeout.

I just cleared my chatbox archive and will be seeing about locking it down so that only members can view it.

Anyhow, just wanted to see if other people using this mod are having similar issues...