Krishty’s Sim Forums

I just banned our first spambot.

We’re an actual real forum now!

Well, it kept them at bay for a while...

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.

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

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

Here we go:
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

Interesting. Thanks!
Most of those are probably just me using different machines though.

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 …

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?

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.

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.

Accumulating all crawlers hitting the site (light blue in this image) should bring us close to the 1200 clicks reported by the forum: 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 …

The crawlers show up as registered users as well. Have they really registered?

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.

The bots are out in force today.

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.

lol it stopped. It just stopped.

Seems like these three gmail addresses I blocked were the only ones the spammers had?

Well done! I'm sure they'll totally give up now.

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).

Congrats, those nasty bots and spammers are really a pain. So yo have to approve every single post now?

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