Plague of Viewbots

help on how to detect view bots?

[PeachyCheech]

Hello, my live streaming platform is being plagued by viewbots. We have an idea of who it could be, but have no idea how to prove it. To make things worse, the person we think is doing it is now putting the idea into peoples' heads that we are doing the view botting ourselves because people started confronting them about it. It also appears that they are now using viewbots to manipulate other streams' views.

We don't know what to do. Does anyone have any idea how we can find out and prove who the one view botting is? Is there anything we can do to block fake views?

Thanks for reading and any advice. xx

[tangor]

Welcome to Webmasterworld!

I personally don't offer videos so have nothing to share in that regard, but we do have a significant Spider/Bot forum here: [webmasterworld.com...]

Bots are bots ... and the above is all about detecting and eliminating such things.

[PeachyCheech]

Thank you for the welcome and direction! I wasn't sure where to start. I'll check out the forum and hopefully find the solution to this problem quickly. :D xx

[phranque]

welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com], PeachyCheech!

[TorontoBoy]

You will need to start with your web site's raw access log, the forensic audit trail of who goes to your site. This file is available from your host provider, usually saved in your account. Each person/bot will have an IP address. The log can tell you a lot of information about your audience.

Further, each person/bot that views your site will also send to your server common information about themselves, such as what exactly they are viewing, but also such things as their language, etc. These are called "request headers".

This is a lot of info, and highly technical. You will need to dig, like a detective, to find a pattern of some kind to identify a recurring bot, and possibly its source.

Usually, but not always, there is a pattern that IDs a bot. You can use this information, and many other techniques to block the bot, and monitor your site to see if it works. This again, is pretty technical, and very much the topic of choice for the "search engine and user agent identification" forum for ID, and then the "Apache web server" forum for blocking.

You are posting to the wrong forum, so the right people may not see this.

[phranque]

as previously suggested by tangor and TorontoBoy this thread is more appropriate for the Search Engine Spider and User Agent Identification forum so i have moved the discussion here to be continued...

[tangor]

Thanks, phranque! Now the experts can have a go.

Personally, I don't get what "value" a "viewbot" would be seeking, other than burning up someone's bandwidth. Is that the purpose?

[lucy24]

Come to think of it ... how, exactly, did you find out about your unwanted viewbots? This is a serious question, because it affects what action you need to take next. (Rough analogy: If you're being plagued by unwanted visitors to ordinary web pages, one of the first questions is whether someone is actually requesting your pages, or just hitting analytics files to make it look as if they’re visiting, because the two actions will have different motivations and different consequences.)

[PeachyCheech]

Lucy24 - We are a small streaming platform, there's a certain amount of traffic that we expect to see, based off past organic traffic trends and the traffic we pay for. There are specific streamers that you expect to get more views, usually because they are popular already on social media or other platforms. The person we believe is view botting has come out of nowhere and has no social media presence, yet somehow they are getting 10 times the views than similar streamers with no chat interaction. When we check our analytics a bunch of their hits are 'direct' which would make sense if they had a large following that would've bookmarked their stream url. Comparing to popular streamers whose high views make sense the number of direct hits are much less. Streamers who normally would only have a handful of viewers who have called them out for view botting have suddenly started getting more views as well.

TorontoBoy - Thank you for the advice!

[tangor]

This is to increase view counts?

[tangor]

Pull your site logs. Look for UAs and IPs that are overly repetitive, check geo locations, etc. Focused attacks usually come from a group of any or all the above. Also look at referer (sic) for any unusual groupings. Block out bot activity that is not beneficial. Use robots.txt for the good/honest bots, and nuke the rest who do not abide declarations in robots.txt.

Have access to your .htaccess file. Learn the directives, and as much regex as needed to make pattern searching work.

Above all, make sure that these views are legit (as in might be going viral) and not some puffer inflating stats to artificially look good.

[PeachyCheech]

Yes they are artificially increasing the view counts.