martyt - 10:06 pm on Jul 12, 2003 (gmt 0)

Just got an e-mail from LookSmart telling me my click budget had been reached in less than half the time it normally takes (based on the last 4 months of traffic).

Checking out my server logs, I see my site was pounded continually over the last several weeks by a small range of IP addresses in China (218.17.x.x and 218.18.x.x) -- they apparently clicked on the same search results again and again, every few minutes, all day long, for many days straight.

LookSmart claims they have some kind of fraud protection that will avoid charging me for multiple clicks from the same host, but when I get clicked on continually for hours at a time, I end up getting billed anyway.

I've sent a refund request in to LookSmart customer service and am in the process of getting my hosting provider to ban the entire range of IP addresses, but that won't do anything to keep them from clicking on the search results.

Any suggestions on how I should handle this? I'm not going to fund my campaign any more until I know it won't happen again. But I really like using LookSmart, as my site shows up at the top of the results for the most important keyword I have (which is probably why the other site was clicking me to death...)