Forum Moderators: DixonJones
Each UA was different, one hit each. Now what is the purpose of all that?
I Googled up www.yournetdetective.com expecting to find some discussion here, but nothing.
Instead, I find all sorts of 'Affiliate Programs'. \
Is THAT is what they are all about? If so, I want no part of it.
The question remains: What possible purpose is a long crazy string of hits like that?
Is somebody trying to see if my pages render differently? If I'm cloaking?
They certainly won't get me to sign up. Anybody else see this recently? -Larry
Well, they are back again, on today's access logs.
Same exact method of operation, only now they picked another 3rd level page,
as always without the accompanying image, and with the same stew of unique user agents.
Before I 86 them via .htaccess, I would like to know if this pest is unique to my site.
Any info at all much appreciated. -Larry
When I get hit by bots from people like this, especially when they lie in their user agent sting, I block them first and (sometimes) ask questions later.
cgrantski asked: I'm curious. Why block them?
Eliz.
-Maurice
"http://www.yournetdetective.com" "Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; X 10.0; Commodore 64)"
There were others for Amiga, macintosh, all sorts of stuff. -Larry
me: I too would like to know why they should be blocked, other than the reason of disliking their tactics or thinking they are suspicious. I'm serious. What tangible harm could they do?
I'm not defending them and I don't think cgrantski is either based on his past posts about ethical subjects. I'm just wondering in general about actual bad effects to the site of this kind of visitor. A little bandwidth usage, yes. The question of "what if everybody did this," okay. General principles, sure. But other than those generalities, is there a tangible threat, any real consequences?
McElvoy asked: What tangible harm could they do?
I'm curious as to why you aren't leery of people/bots/etc who intentionally break the rules. Why would you assume violators to be benign?
Eliz.
Yes, it's using another site for their own purposes, but who hasn't gotten ideas from another site, looked at source code on another site to help with something we're working on, looked at links to another site as a way of finding advertisers, or checked out a company before doing business with them? Or, for that matter, looked closely at a competitor's site or business?
Regarding bandwidth theft - 40 or 50 pages a day with no images is not going to cost anybody anything.
Regarding scraping, I don't see how this could be scraping. And I can't think how this is hacking or preparation for hacking, i.e. stealing somebody's data or bringing down a site. I guess anything's possible.
It's anybody's choice to block anybody for any reason, but in this case it seems to me like an overreaction. If somebody skillful was planning on hacking the site, blocking the IP won't stop them at all.
First, I'm not convinced anybody is "lying."
Occasionally I see phenomena like this where my sites receive a number of obviously "fake" hits, e.g. multiple hits from the same IP range, no or random referers, "real" UA strings which don't match the hit pattern (i.e. fetch pages but not CSS, Javascript etc). Often when I trace the IP I it belongs to some "web analysis" or "intellectual property managment" company who are evidently mining my sites for their own commercial purposes without having the decency to inform me about it e.g. by an explanatory URL in the UA string.
OK, it doesn't directly cost me anything, but it doesn't benefit me either, so in the filter they go.
If you run a PPC site then you have to block all bots that fail to obey robots.txt or you end up allowing bots to generate false clicks to your customers.
Paying for the bandwidth they consume is an issue, them generating false clicks can be a killer!
There are spam bots that can easily generate 20,000+ false clicks per day. They must be blocked.
I hate all bots that fail to obey robots.txt. I block them as fast as I can catch them. But, some of my more savvy clients still get click throughs from there crawling....never a good scene!
