Record amount of users online on both forums

[55Aavenue]

Has anyone else noticed the amount of users online (mostly seems to be unregistered users) on both forums but especially Keen Modding has been going up and up recently and has been setting a new most users ever online record just about every week for about the past month or so? Both sites have new records again as of yesterday, and I've noticed this record keeps getting broken week after week since around September or so.

Here's Keen: Modding.



Oddly, Keen Modding has a lot more traffic recently and a much higher users online record than this forum, even though it is far less active. The record used to be less than 300 a few months ago.

Here's PCFK. Although less, it is also setting a new record almost every week for the about the past month I've noticed. Again, mostly seems to be guests.



Anyway, just thought it was kind of interesting.

[proYorp]

I was just now noticing the high amount of guest users online. Was over 300 on PCKF a half hour ago. Wonder what's causing the huge influx of traffic? The normal longtime average has been 30-70 guests, at least that's what I've usually seen.

I also noticed a seemingly pretty high amount of new registered users, 6 new ones today, and 3 in a 1-hour period.


For the most part I assume it's a lot of spam bots, but I happen to know that at least one of those new users is legit.

[Roobar]

I've been thinking about these numbers, but I believe these are not real guests/views. I think these are some kind of spam bots or something. I can tell that because the source of views from pckf and shikadi combined to my gamejolt page is less than 150 for 6 months. I think there are around ~50 actual people that are currently wurking around the forum, judging by the amount of downloads for my game that came from pckf. Sadly, although it seems like there are more guests than ever before, in actuality there are very few people visiting this forum. And if there were so many guests, there surely should have been much more new registered users and new topics/posts. But it's really dry here. The unusual many registered users names lately looks like too generic to be real. It's like some algorithms are searching for names and made them up. So yeah. Maybe Fleexy could explain these numbers, but I doubt it as he is also barely active.

[55Aavenue]

You're right Roobar, definitely is spam or bots or whatever. Look at these ridiculous numbers lol!

[Roobar]

OMG! If this continues, these bots may overload the server! This may result in plenty of downtimes due to excessive traffic. I think server admins should take measures ASAP and block the spam bots. I don't know if they were doing that before or not, but now is getting out of control. I believe there's a bot activity settings in the forum itself. Or some firewall server-side is needed. I think admins should identify the ip of the bot attacks and block part of their ip address in order to reduce and stop that.

[Benvolio]

When I joined Keenmodding many years ago I needed to get authorisation directly from Andy before my account was activated. I trust that anyone who cares enough to go on our forums properly will not mind a quick email exchange before being free to start participating.

[nanomekia]

I think admins should identify the ip of the bot attacks and block part of their ip address in order to reduce and stop that.

Which is fair - but I'd reckon these are not just coming from one IP, that's not generally how this sort of thing operates. And the more partial IPs you're blocking, the more likely you are to block legit ones, maybe even some of the actual non-bot members' IPs. Moving to needing an email confirmation - not one of the automatic "click here to activate" ones, I'd think, but one that requires you to prove you are in fact not a bot - or such before your account's activated is probably the best bet.

[Roobar]

OK I'm seeing this now:

[proYorp]

Same. I'm getting that a lot, trying to open different threads. There were only like 23 guest users on at one point but things were still acting up. Keen:Modding seems to be working fine for me though.
This is officially Very Bad.

[nanomekia]

Also saw that. This thread was the first thing I thought of but I couldn't get here to post about it.

[Fleexy]

There was an incredible amount of almost certainly automated activity from a certain IP address range. I had to ban a pretty large block of IPs, but as far as I can tell we don't have any normal traffic from that part of the world, and I can revisit the ban when the onslaught calms down. Sorry for the disruption, everyone!

[Nisaba]

Thanks to @Fleexy for taking care!

[nanomekia]

You kick butt, Fleexy. Thanks for all you do.