Recently moved to vbulletin from phpbb but very unusual activity on my forum. Help

[adeel80]

Hi guys,

I recently moved to vbulletin. I have never had who's online showing more than 250 users at a time but I am seeing over 1900 users right now. There are hardly any impressions on my adsense.

Can someone tell me what is going on there?

[Iguana Goddess]

Is your site running really slow? If it is then I would suspect a DoS attack. If not I have no idea other than maybe being some kind of glitch.

[Lynne]

What do you have your session timeout set to? vboptions > cookies > session timeout

[adeel80]

Session time out is set to 1800..thats about 30 mins. Right now I have over 500 users. Usually at this time I only have 100-150.

I am on a dedicated server so the site did not slow down.

If it is a ddos attack. Who could that be and what is the purpose of such an attack?

[Videx]

Have you got any mods installed? I was just reading in another thread someone is convinced the chatbox is causing his online member count to go up (I don't see the issue myself).

[adeel80]

Originally Posted by Videx

Have you got any mods installed? I was just reading in another thread someone is convinced the chatbox is causing his online member count to go up (I don't see the issue myself).

I have no mods on my forum.

[borbole]

Originally Posted by adeel80

Session time out is set to 1800..thats about 30 mins. Right now I have over 500 users. Usually at this time I only have 100-150.

I am on a dedicated server so the site did not slow down.

If it is a ddos attack. Who could that be and what is the purpose of such an attack?

That doesn''t look like a ddos attack. It is more along the lines of a glitch/bug. Anyway, when you converted to vb, did you run the update counters at the maintenance section?

Can you go to the phpmyadmin and truncate the session table? It will log off all the users and the visitors and see if that would fix it later on. But first make a backup of it. Just in case.

I have applied this to another forum but running on another softare that had similiar problems, and after truncating the session table, the problem was fixed. Hopefully this will be the case with your forum as well.

P.s. Can you post the link to your forum as well btw?

P.s.s. If you want to reset the most users online so that it can reflect the true value, then run this query at the phpmyadmin:

UPDATE datastore SET data = '' WHERE title = 'maxloggedin';

If your tables have prefix then you should include it at the query as well.

[napy8gen]

Hi Borbole. I am helping Adeel80 here as I am his skin maker but I am not a programmer. I run that query but it still the same. I also run the all the update counters.

From what I saw, the session kept is too long eventhough the value sets is only 15minutes.

Who is online page shown the IPs different from each other and time varies from 2 hours interval. So the high number of users were collected numbers within 2 hours period not 15minutes.

[Lynne]

Are the Scheduled Tasks running correctly on the forum? If they aren't, then that could be causing a problem.

[napy8gen]

Hi Lynne, scheduled task running ok.
there are many task, all running.