Guest Number Increase

[anthony]

Some may have noticed some ridiculous amounts of guests online. Well... that is some recent fake rubbish that has gotten through the firewall and pretending to be a browser using Amazon Compute servers. The figures don't show bots, they only show actual members and then guests online, but guests can be faked and really its automated scraping or such.

I have been watching this for the past week or two, looking at patterns and sources, and I think I have it nailed down and effectively mitigated. Fingers crossed, it should show close to actual real humans being online here again.

Fake traffic consumes server resources, which are better spent on actual humans to ensure their browsing experience is snappy.

 

[anthony]

For those that like images, this paints a better picture of the growth rubbish traffic, then a new firewall action, then the outcome. Someone got greedy and made me look deeper.

 

[parrotthepolly]

The number of guests are always between 600 - 800 any time of day. Do you know if there's actually that many people or are there bots still?

 

[Friday]

Bots are typically desirable. They’re how ANY of us found this site googling, searching other sources, etc. Fake users/ guests however, selling BS? The opposite.

 

[anthony]

The number of guests are always between 600 - 800 any time of day. Do you know if there's actually that many people or are there bots still?

Not bots... bots are listed separately. If you look at the online list https://www.myptsd.com/online/ and go to the guest tab, 50 guests per page, add the pages, then the members and that should total the online figure. Bots are not counted in the online figures.

I still have all the blocks and such in place for the site... no change, that is just guests viewing the site via browsers. 99.9% of bad bots are blocked at DNS, a whole bunch of authorised bots are allowed which will show on the bot tab, everyone else should be guests in one form or another.

 

[anthony]

To highlight, the first box, unique visitors, you can see is up and down like a yo-yo. Currently that is around 23k daily, but has been as low as 10k daily during the year. Google is very amusing, and it depends what they're up-to at any given time in how much traffic we get. That is the year tab, which takes the last 365 days of data. As you can see... all over the place. Even threats... mitigate them, another bunch popup, mitigate them back down, and I can tell you now, some time next year another bunch of threats will arrive and will have to mitigate those too.

Yo-Yo is the best I can say for web traffic. One factor I can usually see, each year around the sites anniversary being online, I will see a bump in traffic as the site is deemed more trustworthy. Basically, the longer a domain exists for the same purpose, each year it becomes more trustworthy if the content is deemed trustworthy already.

 

[anthony]

Just taking a quick look at this now... there are 850 guests / members online, nearly 500 bots. So yer... its working correctly as I can see.