Bots .... the more ... the merrier?

[KFC911]

Nope! Approx 2500 just showed up ... the forum becomes slooooow.

Does anyone else even know .... or care?

And wtf are they up to?

Enquiring minds .... meh

[masraum]

Huh? How do you know? Was the list of logged on folks huge when you posted?

[KFC911]

I posted a thread some time back about "active users", and how it was artificially extremely high at times.... as that is something that I notice when I access the site via mobile view. I still see older threads revived by "suspicious users" outta the blue.... same old stuff.

This morning, when I first visited ... the total count was around 650 active users, and the site was "working fine" ... within a few minutes, the site became VERY sloooow, and not even responding. So I took another peek ... all of a sudden it had jumped to 3300 (abnormally high for ANY time of day). This is at 6:30 am EST ..... it's an "attack" and not by REAL users .... could be bots or just bogus "connections" ... I dunno. I only see the impact ... and it just cripples the site's performance.

But old threads being revived appear to be bot-like....

I'll get over it

edit: They are still here as of this post.... but latent imo.

[HobieMarty]

What are bots and what do they do?

Sent from my SM-S916U using Tapatalk

[masraum]

Originally Posted by KC911

I posted a thread some time back about "active users", and how it was artificially extremely high at times.... as that is something that I notice when I access the site via mobile view. I still see older threads revived by "suspicious users" outta the blue.... same old stuff.

This morning, when I first visited ... the total count was around 650 active users, and the site was "working fine" ... within a few minutes, the site became VERY sloooow, and not even responding. So I took another peek ... all of a sudden it had jumped to 3300 (abnormally high for ANY time of day). This is at 6:30 am EST ..... it's an "attack" and not by REAL users .... could be bots or just bogus "connections" ... I dunno. I only see the impact ... and it just cripples the site's performance.

But old threads being revived appear to be bot-like....

I'll get over it

edit: They are still here as of this post.... but latent imo.

Yeah, I've seen the old threads bumped for no apparent reason by bots. I think it's been theorized that they bump the threads, wait a while, and then go back and edit a post with an image or some code to help various sites/products with search engine placement.

I rarely notice the active member count. But wow, 3300 is crazy. They are basically DoS the site (intentionally or not).

[KFC911]

Originally Posted by HobieMarty

What are bots and what do they do?

Sent from my SM-S916U using Tapatalk

Short for "robots" ... programs than might do "virtually anything", but not a real person... just "code".... and then ya have the "real people" who are scammers or spammers mixed in.

If a "techie" (that knows stuff) wanted to cripple a web site ... it wouldn't be too difficult for most imo.... except REALLY secure sites.

And those sites have the brain power on the "inside" to see it and intervene.....

I nose stuff .... well .... at least I used too

[pwd72s]

Thanks for the education. I've often wondered the why of old threads being brought back.

[HobieMarty]

Thanks. I wonder what would be the intent of such "bots", just to wreak havoc and cause trouble within a website?

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[pwd72s]

I did see a bit on Fox news about cyber threats from China. probing our infrastructure. Power, water, transportation, you name it. An "expert" mentioning that our cyber security guys are outnumbered 50 to 1 by Chinese hackers...

[masraum]

Originally Posted by HobieMarty

Thanks. I wonder what would be the intent of such "bots", just to wreak havoc and cause trouble within a website?

Sent from my SM-S916U using Tapatalk

Most of the time the goal is to spread ads/spam.

For instance, a lot of bots will register and create posts with a link to some product.

THere's also the theory that if they post about some item enough on the Internet so that search engine crawlers find it that it will be placed higher in search results.

If you're selling junk, you would want your junk to be at the top of the first page when people search for that particular junk. If there are 10,000 websites that have links to your junk, but the next nearest similar junk is only on 2,000 websites, then your junk will feature more prominently in search results for "junk".

[RobFrost]

Originally Posted by KC911

I posted a thread some time back about "active users", and how it was artificially extremely high at times.... as that is something that I notice when I access the site via mobile view. I still see older threads revived by "suspicious users" outta the blue.... same old stuff.



This morning, when I first visited ... the total count was around 650 active users, and the site was "working fine" ... within a few minutes, the site became VERY sloooow, and not even responding. So I took another peek ... all of a sudden it had jumped to 3300 (abnormally high for ANY time of day). This is at 6:30 am EST ..... it's an "attack" and not by REAL users .... could be bots or just bogus "connections" ... I dunno. I only see the impact ... and it just cripples the site's performance.



But old threads being revived appear to be bot-like....



I'll get over it



edit: They are still here as of this post.... but latent imo.

I don't know what hosting you have in place but if you buy a cloudflare account and install it as a CDN you can analyse the bot traffic and put filters in place to mitigate their impact. Additionally it will cache pages and serve all your images for you, making the site faster even with or without bots.

Maybe you have something like that already.

Sent from my SM-G988B using Tapatalk

[RobFrost]

Originally Posted by HobieMarty

What are bots and what do they do?

Sent from my SM-S916U using Tapatalk

Some scrape your content so they can build their own site to attract search engine traffic, on which they can show ads to make money.

Some search for emails to which they can send spam.

Some find your website forms so they can spam you through your forms.

Some search for vulnerabilities and exploits so they can install malicious code on your server.

The malicious code can be used to: try to hack other websites, send email spam to others, send form spam to others, encrypt your server contents so they can demand a ransom to decrypt it, or display messages from Islamic fundamentalists bragging that they hacked it.

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[Bill Douglas]

Bots.

I had a website called lyallbaybeach.co.nz and I'd get about 2,000 hits per month. When I put in the key words tits and kardashians on the site the hit rate went WAY up. A big percentage of the hits were from bots. I had a pic of a girl on a cafe racer Ducati that got a lot of hits from some Italian motorcycle group.

[Gogar]

Originally Posted by HobieMarty

What are bots and what do they do?

They vote everything 1-star and senior citizens lose their mind

[KFC911]

Originally Posted by Gogar

They vote everything 1-star and senior citizens lose their mind

Still have mine .... I don't see 'em on mobile .

FWIW ... most of 'em aren't even on a forum ... just parked on the main forum page I assume. Like Steve alluded ... much like a DoS at a network layer... oh well.

And tho' I haven't been on PARF in a long time ... the really "star struck" reside there, and it just spills over to here for some .... that's a real person(s) ... not bots.

[Steve F]

Clean up on aisle 5

https://forums.pelicanparts.com/porsche-356-technical-forum/

[stevej37]

Lol.....takeover by the Abu Dhabi Call Girls!

[Alan A]

Originally Posted by HobieMarty

Thanks. I wonder what would be the intent of such "bots", just to wreak havoc and cause trouble within a website?

Sent from my SM-S916U using Tapatalk

Lots of them currently are training generative AI to pass as human - so they can post {whatever they are paid to do}

[masraum]

Originally Posted by Steve F

Clean up on aisle 5

https://forums.pelicanparts.com/porsche-356-technical-forum/

Alina5 also spammed the 964/993 forum with the same crap.

[Zeke]

I was reading another forum and it's owned and administered by an individual. He has at least as many members as Pelican. He stated yesterday that 60% of the bots were Russian based.He mentioned something about bots "indexing" his forums (he owns a few) and that at times they really slow down his servers.

So he banned all of Russia. Now, IDK about VPN's and all that. Maybe due to the volume of data VPM's are not financially feasible for bots.

I just thought this was interesting being a tech luddite.