I've never seen so many guests on at once.... :idea:
At one point there was 144 guest in the Hyperspace Tavern...

Now, im not sure if that is a legit surge in guests checking the site, if so awesome, but if not I would be curious to know if the site is being searched by a web crawler, etc.

Any ideas? (mainly for Traveler but any ideas are welcome)

ElusiveMind

something definitely sounds fishy

the active users record is still at 99, so this can't be legit?

I keep getting PM's from people with no prior posts on the nexus, could be innocent enough, but it just seems wierd that they haven't posted a thing in any thread and ask me questions.

What does that mean, searched by a web crawler? Is this cause for concern for some reason? This is a public forum.

Interesting, but unless they are trying to sell you viagra and they seem like legit questions, I don't see any real concern... a little odd yes but I think it looks innocent enough.



Sorry, not trying raise a huge concern over something that could be innocent, I feel until we have a reply from the Traveler with what might have occurred, I will view it as odd yes, but for now innocent.

To answer your question, a web crawler is a useful tool that extracts data from website by following links, website directories, etc. Data usually comprises of pictures, documents, etc. Some crawlers can also be programmed to look for other things like keywords, etc. but that usually takes some know how to make an efficient one...

Web crawlers aren't really deemed a risk but the reason I said that might have been someone using one is because to obtain data quickly in a website (especially a large one), the program will often create multiple sub-routines to make the searching go quicker.... sorta like giving a job to 10 people instead of 1... it goes quicker. So the massive surge in "Guest" users could have been the multiple sub-routines fanning out among the topics.... again at this point only a theory.

I'm sure the Traveler would (or at least should) be able to see what is going on....

So again, no reason for alarm right now, only thought it was very odd and wanting to bring it to the forums attention.

ElusiveMind

Yep, just web crawlers. Most of the time they are Chinese web crawlers. Funny to see but nothing to worry about.

If you receive weird PM's with content that's against our attitude you can always let me know.


Kind regards,

The Traveler

Thanks for the reply Traveler Good to know it was nothing else.

ElusiveMind

typically spiders shouldn't show up as active users...

they can slow the site, and also can be programed to look for vulnerabilities

i had baidu spider(china) doing the same thing, making unusual server requests for pages/links that didn't exist.

if you can pull up the log, see what they are searching for

not all spiders will respect it, but a simple disallow in htt.acssess works(assuming you dont have a robots.txt file)

to be clear, i'm not saying this poses risks to end users, but could be a hack attempt

Thank you for the suggestions.

However, the Chinese spiders don't care about a robots.txt and they change their IP often so the only protection is an anti-DDOS.

I will not disallow robots to scan our sites, having the ability for people to search for the DMT-Nexus and it wealth of information is key in informing the world.


Kind regards,

The Traveler