Bots

[ThePurplePeopleEater]

It's come to my attention that there may be a bot problem in this site's future. It's small now, but it's starting to grow. I've noticed that the "most active members" record is constantly being broken out of nowhere with numbers near the 500 mark these days, when normally there's about 50-100 people active on the site at any time.
Then about a month ago, I checked the bottom of the site to see birthday and was met with about 50 users' birthdays, all at once, and all the same age. I checked their profiles and their bios all linked to the same scam website that I won't bother checking or linking. Point is, bots are slowly creeping their way onto the site. Just wanted to let you guys know.

[rambolz]

Right now when I'm writing this post there are 399 users online: 5 registered, 394 guests. If you see a large number of birthdays like you mentioned probably for the best would be to copy all their names and send a PM to a mod unless there is a way to report a profile? Or does anyone have a better idea of dealing with registered bots? There's not much that can be done about the 394 guests that I think sounds way too high to be legit people.

EDIT: I don't know if this is anything related, but I have weird experiences from other forums. I haven't checked the online users, but topics which contain specific items have at least 10x more than other topics. Specifically on one forum, whenever you wrap something in the [code] tags (doesn't matter what's in it) the topic gets thousands of views in few hours whereas other topics have a few hundred. It just seems like some kind of bots just look through topics with the code tags.

[RevanFan]

There are tons of bots signing up almost daily. Of this we are aware. If you have specific names, please PM a moderator. However, we believe the damage they cause is very minimal unless they become active users, which is why we put in place a block for any new member. All first posts must be moderator approved, which is why few to no spam bots have been able to make posts.

[ultimatum77]

It's been going on for a while sadly, a lot of them are from search engines like google, yahoo, and Majestic-12. They scan the forum for new posts/articles and link it to their search engine. For instance if you search Madden 2008 troubleshooting within Google the first two results are from this site. It's a good thing in generating more traffic to the website but also a bit annoying when like you said there are "300" magical users appearing on the website as "guests".

[RevanFan]

It's been going on for a while sadly, a lot of them are from search engines like google, yahoo, and Majestic-12. They scan the forum for new posts/articles and link it to their search engine. For instance if you search Madden 2008 troubleshooting within Google the first two results are from this site. It's a good thing in generating more traffic to the website but also a bit annoying when like you said there are "300" magical users appearing on the website as "guests".

Actually, those crawlers are not the bots being referred to. And I believe web crawlers are labeled as such in the "Who's Online?" section. No, the bots are simply spam accounts created on the site that try to link to bad links. And the "guests" are usually just that. People who aren't members or crawlers that are on the site. No way to know if they're bots or legit, unless they sign up, but since they're just guests, they're not exactly doing anything either way.

[rambolz]

Wow, now the record is 1760 users online a few days ago. I wonder how high this will grow

[rambolz]

Okay, I just got a bunch of errors trying to access the site, maybe it has to do with the number of "guests" online (about 1350 right now). See the attached screenshots

EDIT: Oh wow the screenshots are huge, sorry about that!

[RevanFan]

Okay, I just got a bunch of errors trying to access the site, maybe it has to do with the number of "guests" online (about 1350 right now). See the attached screenshots

EDIT: Oh wow the screenshots are huge, sorry about that!

I've never had either of those first two errors on this site. The third one I've had, but it usually resolves itself after a few minutes.

[BelieverInTeal]

I'm also seeing the insufficient storage and resource limit errors a lot recently.

As a reminder to folks reading this, if you are unable to view the site for any reason, make sure you join us over at Football Idiot 2.

[Rixster67r]

I have been seeing these screens lately..... just now when I clicked new posts and also when I first tried to reply to this post......

Also there are 36 guests as I posted this....