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Hey Y'all, Happy New Year.
Here's an interesting one. Still running V7.7.5 (old PHP still) with plans to upgrade the server and board software in the future.
About a week ago the board locked up with the "SQL Error: The table 'ubbt_ONLINE' is full". Clearing the cache brought the board back up, but it soon crashed again with the same error. A quick search here in this forum lead me to the thread about this error and the solution to change this data table entry from Memory to MyISAM (disk). This is the default setting in V8, not so in V7. That change solved the issue. I find it interesting that another board admin here experienced the same error on their forum about the same time and reported it here in the Version 7/8 Support forum.
While dealing with this issue I took a closer look at my Who's Online list. I suspected there were far more bots crawling my forum than were listed (tons of guests, few robots listed). I decided to look for an updated robot / crawler list (which I hadn't updated in many many years). Over on the UBBDev message board, I found the newest version of the robots list was from 2022. I installed that, but it did not drastically reduce the number of 'Guests'. So I decided to create an updated list, using the resources listed on the UBBDev thread to identify all known robots / crawlers as of today. I uploaded my updated version of the robots / crawlers text file to that UBBDev thread, and installed it on my forum. Again, it helped expand the robots listed on Who's Online, but I I'm still getting inundated with 'guest users'. As an example, with a 10 minute view period set for Who's Online, I'm seeing almost 500 guests, and over 60 robots.
Here's the interesting part.... Looking at the Guest Users, I see multiple instances from different IP address (all with a standard user type user agent), simultaneously reading a thread from 14 years ago. Sometimes 5 or more 'Guests' are reading the same thread from different IPs. These are obviously not normal human users / guests. Each instance carries a different browser type user-agent, and none look like robots.
Does anyone have any insight into what's going on here?
My forum just past 25 years old... and like most, the online activity has dwindled over the years in favor of other social media outlets. But we have a small loyal following and 25 years of archived technical information that can't be duplicated anywhere else. Even so, it's interesting to see almost 500 'visits' in a 10 minute period, most not identified as a web crawler / robot.
I'm curious if anyone else is experiencing inundation of 'Guests'.
Thanks all.
PaulC
MonteCarloSS.com
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