strange refering guestbooks in my stat's ??

[Villa Bussola]

Script URL:www.villabussola.com
Version of script:1.43
Hosting company:AlphaMegahosting
URL of phpinfo.php:
URL of session_test.php:
What terms did you try when SEARCHING for a solution:stats



This last few days i noticed something very strange.
In the stats of our website there are a lot of guestbooks on other sites logged as referer page to my site, Strange thing is that those guestbooks do not link to my site as far as i can find, don't understand what's happening! can annybody shine a light on that or have the same strange problem?

You can view the (december) stats at:

http://www.villabussola.com/webstat/usage_200612.html

By the way, after last update, absolutely no more spam in my guestbook, i'm verry pleased with this script!!!!

Peter

[Villa Bussola]

I'm still puzzled by this and also a bit worried!!

Seems like about 80% of our recent trafic is to gbook.php and i'm sure these are not normal visits, something strange is going on.....
Both highest entry and exit page is gbook.php.
Is it possible that other sites use the script on our site as their guestbook script
What can i do to avoid this

Greetz Peter

[Klemen]

Not sure what this could be, but it's not directly related to the GBook script. Probably entries from "spambots" which travel from one guestbook to another trying to spam them.

As long as your guestbook keeps clean I wouldn't worry about it. You could for example check your logs from which IPs come the most accesses to your guestbook and ban them. Just make sure you don't ban anything friendly, like Googlebot

[Lavern]

I get a lot of "spam" traffic to. Can you help me fix this? I enjoy reading my stats, but they are messed up!

[Klemen]

Unfortunately you can't really do much about it as these are automated programs that browse random guestbooks on the internet.

You could try two things:
1. blocking search engines from spidering your guestbook with robots.txt
2. manually find and block those IPs from your entire server (not just guestbook but entire site to not mess up your stats)

I don't know of any other efficient way of doing this. I get so many automated hits to my site that I stopped worrying about it long ago.

[ravetildon1]

yes, it jsut make traffic stats and bandwidth cost go thru the roof. Maybe the automated programs are leaving a trail behind that we can trace?

[Klemen]

There's not much you can do about it except to ban each of the offending IP.

These are probably scripts/programs that try to automatically submit (spam) thousands of guestbooks/forms/forums - thanks to the GBook protection they don't come through, but they are trying anyway. In last version of GBook I added IP banning based on certain criteria (if it's 100% spam then the IP is banned) and I already have over 6700 IP's banned so the numbers are huge.

I use AwStats and what I do once per month is check who the most frequent visitors (IPs) are, do a little research (IP whois lookup, see what pages they've been to etc) and I end up banning most of them (or their IP ranges) directly in the server's firewall. It's quite some work and tricky work that is (you need to be carful not to ban Googlebot for example).

I don't think your bandwidth costs are going thru the roof just because of scripts trying to spam GBook though. Here's an greatly exaggerated example:
- 15Kb for the Gbook HTML
- 65Kb is ALL of the images (smileys) are loaded on page
This makes 80Kb, let's say it's 100Kb.
Let's say scripts try to spam your GBook 10.000 times per month (another hughe exaggeration), this would bring you to about 1Gb traffic per month.

Note the above is an exaggerated estimation, but even if it was true 1Gb traffic costs $0.5-$2.0 and that isn't thru the roof It is very annoying though, I agree.


So, unless you can ban (at least the large spammers) from the server I'm afraid there isn't much you can do about it. I already accepted it as a part of today's online business. And as long as their SPAM is blocked I'm happy.