Miscellaneous Hacks - Ban Spiders by User Agent

What this mod does
With this mod you can enter User Agents to watch or ban, you can also recieve emails or have an Output.txt created and updated with time and date of visits. It doesn't just have to be spiders, you can watch, log or ban any useragent!

How to install
Simply import the product ban_spider, the mod is active by default but none of the other options are turned on.

What is a UserAgent?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_agent

Understanding a UserAgent string
http://user-agent-string.info/parse

Genuine User Getting Blocked?
https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showpost....&postcount=105

Tools to help
http://whatsmyuseragent.com/SwitchingUserAgents.asp
http://www.botsvsbrowsers.com/SimulateUserAgent.asp

FAQ
https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showpost....&postcount=137

How does it work?
https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showpost....&postcount=381

What's a bot?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spambot

How do i ban a bot?
https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showpost....&postcount=318
https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showpost....7&postcount=51

Where's output.txt located?
https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showpost....&postcount=216

Bad bot lists
https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showpost....&postcount=259
https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showpost....&postcount=224
https://vborg.vbsupport.ru/showpost....&postcount=281

Tested on vb3.7.x, vB3.8.x , vB4.x.x but should work on any version.

__________________________________________________ __________________
Special thanks to:
Lior
KH99
BoP5
for helping me sort out a few issues

...and beta testers
ForceHSS (Special thanks to Force for latest testing)
ozzy47
GreyHost

If you use this please mark as INSTALLED

History
9th June 2011 Orginal xml added
12th June 2011 Added both email notification and text file logging
22nd June 2011 Version 2.0.0, Added create thread on activity

1. Added match facility you can now use something like Yandex and it will match MOZILLA/5.0 (COMPATIBLE; YANDEXBOT/3.0; +HTTP://YANDEX.COM/BOTS)
2. Added clickable link to visited thread

22nd September 2011 added user redirect url selection
08th October Beta testing started for thread creation.
20th October Beta testing started for emailing.
21st October Beta testing complete Ver 3.0.0 uploaded
29th October minor fix added to cope with empty userid on thread creation
30th October Beta testing automatic redirection to spiders/bots IP
31st October New xml uploaded with automatic redirect to IP
25th November Minor fix for blank forumid fixed
26th November 2011 Fixed version check & create thread Off by default
17th December 2014 Version 3.1.0 uploaded, Hook changed extra logging and statistics added by Ozzy47 (Chris)
18th December 2014 Version 3.1.1 uploaded, prevented spiders being counted when mod turned off.
17th December 2014 Version 3.1.2 uploaded, due to rogue code from another mod
The Bad Bots list is now included in the product
Please prune out all those that you wish to be able to see your site (i suggest you definately prune out "DA" and "Custo" :

Support will now only be given to those who have this mod marked as INSTALLED

[vb50kgpoo]

Originally Posted by ForceHSS

What is there full host name

That is it !
They go by those generic names only, nothing else.

[Simon Lloyd]

Originally Posted by vb50kgpoo

Hi Simon
Yours is a great product. I made the mistake of uninstalling it in order to use AbyssGuard, which is plagued with problems. I have now reinstalled Ban Spiders By User Agent. One question, are there any ramifications in banning \wbot[\/\-] with your mod? I ask as putting \wbot[\/\-] directly into my htaccess banning mecahism causes issues.
Regards / RSVP

Im ,y mod you are banning any useragent that has any occurrence of one of the strings in your list, i very much doubt that \wbot[\/\-] is found in any useragent as the looks like a regular expression, in my mod simply wbot will do if thats in their useragent.

Originally Posted by vb50kgpoo

Also.......

Does anyone know what these bots are;

Robot ID - Hits - Bandwidth - Last visit - Hits on robots.txt
robot 772 8576221 20121111093454 0
crawl 699 9556953 20121108085243 0
spider 5 114750 20121106065956 0

Bad bots using generic names?

Thats just stats from cpanel awstats and mean nothing other than spiders were identified with those in their identifier.

Originally Posted by vb50kgpoo

That is it !
They go by those generic names only, nothing else.

They are not their useragents, read some of the links that i took time and trouble to post in the mod description on hpw to find the useragent.

[bzcomputers]

Originally Posted by TheSupportForum

wont MSIE 1 block MSIE Beta 10 ?

which means MSIE 8, 9 only visitors

It won't block MSIE Beta 10, but it will block MSIE 10. Best to remove MSIE 1 from your list now. I haven't seen any references in the output.txt file of anything prior to MSIE 5 so removing MSIE 1 probably won't cause any problems.




Edit: If you were wondering what the IP Address 108.2.106.107 is, it is Verizon's Search Engine (www.verizon.net) definitely not something you would want to block.

[Max Taxable]

Originally Posted by bzcomputers

It won't block MSIE Beta 10, but it will block MSIE 10. Best to remove MSIE 1 from your list now. I haven't seen any references in the output.txt file of anything prior to MSIE 5 so removing MSIE 1 probably won't cause any problems

Using the time based Mod in my signature, I often see user agents with early IE, such as 3, 4 and 5, but you're right - I haven't seen any IE 1 or 2 in so long, there's no doubt it would be good to remove MSIE 1 from the ban list.

Thanks for the information!

[Simon Lloyd]

Originally Posted by bzcomputers

It won't block MSIE Beta 10, but it will block MSIE 10. Best to remove MSIE 1 from your list now. I haven't seen any references in the output.txt file of anything prior to MSIE 5 so removing MSIE 1 probably won't cause any problems.




Edit: If you were wondering what the IP Address 108.2.106.107 is, it is Verizon's Search Engine (www.verizon.net) definitely not something you would want to block.

It will block MSIE Beta 10 if it appears like that in the useragent, this mod will block ALL instances where the exact string in your list is found in the UA.

[My Hattiesburg]

Okay, I've installed this and it seems to be working fine, but I have some questions.

At first the Baidu spider was hammering us, hitting the site about every 8 seconds, but now it seems to have more or less given up on us. Yandex, on the other hand, seems to have intensified it's attempted crawls. At first it was hitting the site about every 25 seconds but over the course of this install has ranged everywhere from every 1 second to where it's at now, about every 1.5 minutes. The 1.5 minute attempts have only occurred in the last couple of days.

A couple of days ago when Yandex was hitting us every 1 second, we had some server load issues. I don't know if this is related but it seems it might be and I'm wondering if logging the blocks to a text file might be counterproductive in that area, writing to the file every second or so.

Also, Yandex is using the same IP address every time, so I thought it might be best to just block it using the .htaccess file, but that doesn't seem to have had any effect. Is this mod redirecting Yandex before it has a chance to read the .htaccess file or is Yandex simply ignoring it?

[smirkley]

Your server would be the one to decide if Yandex is blocked by the .htaccess file or not.
If the ip is denied in htaccess, your server will block before any vb module loads, or any page opther for that matter.

[Simon Lloyd]

Smirkley is right, .htaccess is loaded before anything else. As for my mod using Yandex as a blocking string will block it, if it is still showing then thats because either they dont actually have yandex in the user agent or you've entered more than just Yandex as the string, remember, my mod bans anything that has exactly your string to look for (including spaces), so if your strings in my mod look like this:
Baidu
Yandex
SoSo
.....etc
then yandex will be blocked, however if it looks like this:
Baidu
Yandex123
SoSo
....etc
then any bot with just yandex in their string or any other kind of yandex like YandexWorld will not be blocked, but anything containing yandex123 will be blocked.

As for writing to a file, just turn that bit off, it's there simply for test purposes, trouble shooting or checking on individual user agents.

[My Hattiesburg]

Your mod is blocking Yandex, but I just figured since it was using the same IP address every time it might be better to just go ahead and block that IP.

I guess I didn't do something right in the .htaccess file because Yandex was getting past it and was getting blocked by the mod.

[Simon Lloyd]

yandex doesn't always use the same IP, somewhere earlier in the pages for this mod i think i posted how to do it in .htaccess if you wish.