The Arcive of Official vBulletin Modifications Site.

Crazy Number of Guests... · **Released**: 12-08-2003

Our forums - http://forums.deeperblue.net - are seeing some weird behaviour.

About 3 weeks ago the number of guests on our forums seemed to go crazy - we jumped from arodun 20-50 guests at any one time to 200-300. They all seem to be unique IP's, however they only ever seem to look at the Forum Main Index.

About a week later we discovered that our server had been compromised by a hacker with a rootkit and we had to rebuild the whole server. Our ISP (Rackspace) was great in helping with this and we got the server rebuilt and reconfigured within a couple of days.

However the forums still reported large numbers of guests. We have checked our server on a daily basis for compromise now and we know no-one had had unauthorised access to it.

Our website tracking stats (webtrendslive) do not show any increase in number of visitors to the forums, nor does our bandwidth stats show any increase.

Our forums are a hacked version of Vbulletin (hence we can't get official support) 2.2.9 but we hadn't changed any of the code for at least 3 months before this behaviour started...

Does anyone have any ideas?

MindTrix · #2 12-08-2003, 04:49 PM

Could it be down to search bots such as google etc?

Stephan Whelan · #3 12-08-2003, 10:32 PM

I thought that might be the case but unfortunately it's not. All our unique IP's and resolve to hostnames all over the world.

Our ISP doesn't believe it's a DOS or DDOS either.

I'm stumped!

Erwin · #4 12-08-2003, 11:02 PM

Maybe your forum just got popular.

Stephan Whelan · #5 12-08-2003, 11:08 PM

Erwin,

I'd love to believe that but i'd expect our webtrendslive service to report an increase in traffic if that was the case.

Ho-hum...

X vBulletin 3.8.12 by vBS Debug Information
Page Generation 0.08066 seconds Memory Usage 2,237KB Queries Executed 20 (?)
More Information
Template Usage: (1)SHOWTHREAD (1)ad_footer_end (1)ad_footer_start (1)ad_header_end (1)ad_header_logo (1)ad_navbar_below (1)ad_showthread_beforeqr (1)footer (1)forumjump (1)forumrules (1)gobutton (1)header (1)headinclude (1)modsystem_post (1)navbar (6)navbar_link (120)option (5)post_thanks_box (5)post_thanks_button (1)post_thanks_javascript (1)post_thanks_navbar_search (5)post_thanks_postbit_info (4)postbit (5)postbit_onlinestatus (5)postbit_wrapper (1)spacer_close (1)spacer_open (1)tagbit_wrapper Phrase Groups Available: global inlinemod postbit posting reputationlevel showthread	Included Files: ./showthread.php ./global.php ./includes/init.php ./includes/class_core.php ./includes/config.php ./includes/functions.php ./includes/class_hook.php ./includes/modsystem_functions.php ./includes/functions_bigthree.php ./includes/class_postbit.php ./includes/class_bbcode.php ./includes/functions_reputation.php ./includes/functions_post_thanks.php Hooks Called: init_startup init_startup_session_setup_start init_startup_session_setup_complete cache_permissions fetch_postinfo_query fetch_postinfo fetch_threadinfo_query fetch_threadinfo fetch_foruminfo style_fetch cache_templates global_start parse_templates global_setup_complete showthread_start showthread_getinfo forumjump showthread_post_start showthread_query_postids showthread_query bbcode_fetch_tags bbcode_create showthread_postbit_create postbit_factory postbit_display_start post_thanks_function_post_thanks_off_start post_thanks_function_post_thanks_off_end post_thanks_function_fetch_thanks_start post_thanks_function_fetch_thanks_end post_thanks_function_thanked_already_start post_thanks_function_thanked_already_end fetch_musername postbit_imicons bbcode_parse_start bbcode_parse_complete_precache bbcode_parse_complete postbit_display_complete post_thanks_function_can_thank_this_post_start tag_fetchbit_complete forumrules navbits navbits_complete showthread_complete
Messages:

The Arcive of Official vBulletin Modifications Site.

It is not a VB3 engine, just a parsed copy!