Further Firewall Tweaks
Anyone on in the last few days would see the online numbers have spiked again. This is some of the issue I have talked about previously, being that it tends to be more useless traffic than legitimate people. Changing all the firewall setup recently, I've had to wait to see what pops from those changes. There is one "good" bot (lets call it that, as its not bad, but its uneccessary and annoying at best and does nothing useful for a website) that was allowed through causing the large spike in online guests. Instead of it reading as a bot, it uses a browser to mimic itself in order to retrieve link profiles that they then sell to marketers as information on who to link to and from. Tends to cause spam and serves no search engine purpose.
That has now been rectified and removed, even though it is good, its useless for our purposes and especially how it does not present itself as a robot (uncounted in our system) and instead as a browser referral, which is just annoying.
So that online number will drop again now, as its pretty aggressive and causes a couple hundred online guests all by itself at the pace it hits the site from unique IP's.