We finally made it

Hang out and chat.
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Krishty
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We finally made it

Post by Krishty »

I just banned our first spambot.

We’re an actual real forum now!
mikew
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Re: We finally made it

Post by mikew »

Well, it kept them at bay for a while...
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Krishty
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Re: We finally made it

Post by Krishty »

Four IPs spamming the hell out of this place …

… I’ll check out if there are ways to force-approve the first post of each user.
mikew
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Re: We finally made it

Post by mikew »

There were a lot of 'activity' last week, as I could see the read counts jump although nothing was posted.
It could be that my 'F29 Retaliator' thread had gone viral of course, but I somehow doubt that :D
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Krishty
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Re: We finally made it

Post by Krishty »

I don’t have deep insight because this board neither tracks users nor embeds 3rd party tools like Google Analytics to do so, but I do evaluate my server logs and you’ll get a snapshot when I’m home.

Sorry for busting your dream: We have very few human visitors, and maaany crawlers/scrapers :(

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Krishty
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Re: We finally made it

Post by Krishty »

Here we go:
image.png
image.png (26.34 KiB) Viewed 3912 times
FWIW, we had 80 legit visitors on 2022-01-24, the day we announced the forum on Combatsim/SimHQ/Discord.

I guess the main problem is missing HTTPS support. I can see that Google doesn’t want to touch us with a ten foot stick because of that. Aside from flight sims being a niche hobby, and forums in general becoming replaced with Discord and Twitter, of course ;)
mikew
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Re: We finally made it

Post by mikew »

Interesting. Thanks!
Most of those are probably just me using different machines though.
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Krishty
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Re: We finally made it

Post by Krishty »

Yeah, in this case, probably every machine will be counted once.

A colleague of mine just quit because his hobby game project took off. Now he’s constantly being sent dick pics on Discord. The price you pay for stardom …
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Krishty
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Re: We finally made it

Post by Krishty »

According to Google, one of the most frequent search queries leading to this forum is simpforum. Is Google asking me to start a career as e-boy? :D
mikew
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Re: We finally made it

Post by mikew »

I had to look that up, but still really not sure what an e-boy is...

I've also put my own career as a 'social media influencer' on hold, so haven't got the lip fillers done yet. I thought my 'Robocop 3' thread had gone viral as the Views went from 3 to >200, but there is probably another explanation. :D
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Krishty
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Re: We finally made it

Post by Krishty »

mikew wrote: 2022-Sep-19, 08:23I thought my 'Robocop 3' thread had gone viral as the Views went from 3 to >200, but there is probably another explanation. :D
Accumulating all crawlers hitting the site (light blue in this image) should bring us close to the 1200 clicks reported by the forum:
image.png
image.png (10.05 KiB) Viewed 3775 times
Assuming that crawlers would follow every thread on the start page is probably fine.

>75 % of traffic by crawlers and scrapers – I didn’t expect that when I registered my first domain …
mikew
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Re: We finally made it

Post by mikew »

The crawlers show up as registered users as well. Have they really registered?
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Krishty
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Re: We finally made it

Post by Krishty »

No, phpBB maintains a special account for known crawlers. When e.g. Google crawls the site, phpBB reacts by displaying the site as if the Google pseudo user looked at it. That’s a built-in feature and I think it allows you to micro-manage what goes to search engines.
mikew
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Re: We finally made it

Post by mikew »

The bots are out in force today. :(
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Krishty
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Re: We finally made it

Post by Krishty »

Yeah, I’ve started banning entire IP ranges and email domains yesterday. Seems like this makes the spammers think the forum was a more worthwhile target … I’m now hammered by actual gmail addresses and ordinary IPs.

I think I found the loophole that allowed the Newly Registered Users group to post without approval. (Roles were not properly assigned.) We’ll see in a few minutes.
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Krishty
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Re: We finally made it

Post by Krishty »

lol it stopped. It just stopped.

Seems like these three gmail addresses I blocked were the only ones the spammers had? :D
mikew
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Re: We finally made it

Post by mikew »

Well done! I'm sure they'll totally give up now. :D
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Krishty
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Re: We finally made it

Post by Krishty »

It works! The latest spam didn’t make it into the public view. It sat in my inbox, well-behaved, waiting for approval.

I think you have moderator rights as well, so maybe you’ll see it yourself in the coming days. Please neither approve nor disapprove; I’ll just delete & ban the users from time to time (which will also delete their posts awaiting approval).
Scorpion82
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Re: We finally made it

Post by Scorpion82 »

Congrats, those nasty bots and spammers are really a pain. So yo have to approve every single post now?
Scorpion82
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Re: We finally made it

Post by Scorpion82 »

Ok, seems to be for newcomers, the approval thingy.
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